


The Woman In Red

by ChancellorGriffin



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - 19th Century, Alternate Universe - Historical, Alternate Universe - Victorian, Bram Stoker AU, Dracula Influence/References, F/M, Gothic, Halloween, Minor Character Death, Sexual Content, Sort of But Not Really Based on the Plot of "Dracula" With Some Key Differences, Supernatural Elements, Victorian
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-31
Updated: 2017-04-13
Packaged: 2018-08-27 07:54:03
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 12
Words: 78,543
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8393395
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ChancellorGriffin/pseuds/ChancellorGriffin
Summary: England, 1890.  When former mayor Thelonious Jaha returns home from abroad, bringing his peculiar foreign bride Rebecca with him, strange and sinister happenings begin to haunt the seaside village of Arcadia. But when an unimaginable evil possesses the soul of Raven Reyes, her closest friends, Clarke and Abby Griffin, must turn for help to the only person left they can trust: their beloved family friend Marcus Kane.  Marcus, who moved halfway across the world to escape his forbidden passion for his best friend's wife, is disturbed to find his tormented feelings for Abby undiminished by distance and time.  As the three join forces to free their village and save Raven before it's too late - assisted by the eccentric but brilliant Dr. Lexa Van Helsing, a scholar of the supernatural with a shadowy past - Marcus and Abby's passion for each other becomes harder to suppress.  But as they find themselves growing closer, the danger around them increases . . . for The Woman In Red will not be satisfied with the soul of only one victim.





	1. Prologue

**Author's Note:**

> Happy Halloween to Nicole Clowes, AKA @peachyjareth, AKA that glorious creature who makes all that amazing Kabby fan art! This fic is part of the Kabby Trick-or-Treats exchange, which you can find at http://kabby-holiday-fun.tumblr.com/
> 
> NOTE: because this is for a Halloween fic exchange, I'm posting the chapters as I finish putting the final tweaks on them but they're all rolling out over the course of October 31st, so you'll be able to read the entire thing by the end of the day!

** **

**LONDON, 1910**

_It was a dark and stormy night._

_That is the way all horror stories ought to begin, is it not?  It could not possibly be a balmy spring afternoon, streets frosted by the snowy-white blossoms of flowering cherry trees.  No, it must be a black, wet evening in October, in the coldest and dreariest season, as the year rounds the corner from autumn to winter and begins to draw to its close.  A full moon is a necessity; the approaching solemnity of All Hallows’ Eve, a decided advantage.  And you and I, Dear Reader, should be ensconced in warm quilts before a roaring parlor fire, sipping brandy and listening to the rain hiss against the cobblestones outside.  This is the proper setting for such a tale as the one I have to tell._

_But upon my honor, I speak no more than plain truth; for it_ was _a dark and stormy night which set in motion the tale whose horrors I will now unfold to you.  I myself was no witness to these events (thank the Lord!) but learned of them afterwards from my friend and colleague Dr. Van Helsing; despite a lifetime marked with extraordinary incidents, the good doctor informed me that no horror had ever compared with this most fearsome and sinister case._

_Van Helsing was not yet present upon this particular dark and stormy night of which I now speak, and will enter our tale in later chapters; but there is no one alive whose judgment I trust more profoundly nor whose scrupulously detailed accounting of the incident in question could possibly have been more thorough.  Therefore I feel great confidence in assuring you, Dear Reader, that although the tale I now unfold may strike you as terribly shocking – overflowing with supernatural horrors, violent death, lusts of the flesh, and extraordinary peril – rest assured that I speak only what is true.  The heroic tale of the four women who rid the earth of a great evil and the good man who stood by their side has been, until now, left untold; but we have lived through the dawning of a new century, and after the passing of twenty years these five remarkable people (all of whom, praise God, are yet living and remain well) – have consented that their story, in its entirety, ought at last to be told._

_And so, Dear Reader, I invite you to journey with me into the past – a fitting quest, as we near the Feast of All Souls, when the boundary dividing living, breathing mortals from all the dead we have lost is at its thinnest and most fragile, when we may face each other across the gulf of Death and see one another as clearly as you and I see each other now.  “Nonsense!” I hear you scoff. “This is the talk of commoners and children.  Sensible English minds formed in sensible English schools know better.”  Well, I shall leave it as a question whether, by the end of this story, your feelings remain unchanged, or whether you have come to believe, as Hamlet said to his friend, “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”_

_But whether you doubt or believe me yet, still, take my hand and walk back with me twenty years to that dark and stormy night in 1890, in the village of Arcadia, on a street called Chancellor Lane. You are standing in front of Number Ten, that elegant white house you see before you, its lights blazing merrily in the black and drear night.  This is the home of Abigail Griffin and her daughter Clarke.  Next door is Number Sixteen; see you that sinister gothic ruin with its almost castle-like battlements?  A house seemingly out of time, a house that belongs in the wilderness of Eastern Europe hundreds of years past, not in the civilized England of morning newspapers and busy train stations.  Number Sixteen is the home of Thelonious Jaha.  Once he was mayor of this town, before moving several years ago to Paris.  But now he resides on English soil once more, and Mrs. Griffin has invited the neighbors to dinner in honor of his return - and to meet his new foreign bride._

_But hark! Do you hear the rattle of a carriage clattering across the cobblestones, pulling to a halt in front of the house where you now stand?  The carriage is bound for Number Thirteen, the house across the street - plain red brick, humble and comfortable, the home of an unassuming man who puts on no airs - but its lone passenger alights in front of the wrong house.  Do you see the man – very tall, with a soldier’s bearing and dark hair going gray at the temples –  stepping out of the carriage into the slick wet street, staring up at the brightly-lit front door of Number Ten with an almost fearful expression in his warm brown eyes as though uncertain of what fate lies behind it?_

_We have been waiting for him._ _Now that he has finally arrived, our story may begin._

 _And so, Dear Reader, the time has come for us to part ways._ _I return to my home in London, to my quilt and brandy and fireplace, in the Year of Our Lord nineteen hundred and ten; and I leave you_ _twenty years in the past, in the bleak pouring rain, standing in the middle of Chancellor Lane at the very beginning of a story.  I take my respectful leave of you, and beg you to remember – if you should find this chilling tale too frightening for your tastes or too wild and impossible for belief – that you were warned, and proceed at your own risk._

_Your obedient servant,_

_Bram Stoker_


	2. The Mayor's Wife

 In all his forty-two years, Marcus Kane had never desired anything with the burning, violent fervor with which he now yearned to be in his own bed.

He had boarded a ship in Bombay two weeks ago, landed this morning in Southampton, and changed trains at Exeter, Newtons Abbot and Kingsbridge before finally disembarking with his trunks and boxes at Hope Cove, from whence there still remained a jostling, wearying three miles by carriage along the sea road.  By the time the lights of his own village finally emerged from the distant fog to greet him for the first time in ten years, Marcus had grown so weary of travel – wearing the same suit for days on end, hauling his trunks from place to place, ground that shifted queasily beneath his feet, the fatiguing cacophony of train whistles and horse-hooves and uniformed men barking “Tickets, please!” – that fantasies of his own house, his own bed, taunted him like a shimmering illusion he would journey forever without reaching. 

Perhaps he had died aboard ship, and this was hell.  It would not have surprised him.

Miller, his late mother’s butler, had remained in service to the new tenants after the East India Company had sent Marcus abroad.  Miller was unfailingly competent, and the cable waiting in Southampton proclaimed all in readiness for his master's arrival.  The linens aired, a hot English supper waiting on the table, a crystal decanter of port at the ready beside Marcus’ preferred chair in the parlor, the one closest to the fire. 

Home.  Finally, after ten years’ absence, _home._

The thought of sleeping tonight in a real feather bed, with the sheets turned down properly the way he liked, made the last few hours of his journey a torment; it seemed cruel, now that he was so near home, for the brief leg from Hope Cove to Arcadia to be so very much more wearying than twelve entire days at sea, but so it was.  He could scarcely keep his seat as the carriage crossed the stone bridge behind the old mill and began clattering down the cobblestones of the high street, so wild with impatience was he to finally, _finally_ put his wandering days behind him and settle, for the foreseeable future, in one place.

Arcadia was very little altered since his absence, which comforted him.  The old mill looked the same, the pub on the high street was just as he remembered, and the crumbling stone church on the outskirts of the forest remained as sinister-looking as ever it was.  He was home.  Dinner and port and bed were so near he could feel them beckon to him as the carriage finally turned left onto Chancellor Lane and his own lamps shining out of his own windows came at last into view.

“Here, sir!” called the coachman over his shoulder as the carriage clattered to a halt on the wrong side of the wide cobbled street.  “Number Ten, Chancellor Lane.”

“No, I’m Number Thirteen,” he said, swallowing his irritation. “Across the street.”  _For God’s sake,_ he added silently, _there are only three blasted houses on this street, how difficult could this possibly be?_

“Apologies, sir,” said the coachman, who did not sound really sorry, and he prodded the horses as if to drive on.

Desperate to be out of this damned carriage, and fearing the man would take the long way round the block to get there, Marcus stopped him.  “Never mind,” he said shortly.  “Go on without me, the butler will take care of the trunks and your fare.  Just let me out here, I’d like to stretch my legs.”

“Right you are, sir,” said the man agreeably, and Marcus opened the carriage door to the deafening sibilant hiss of an October rain.  Watching his step with care to avoid the slick flat cobbles, it took him a moment to get his bearings, and the carriage had clip-clopped its way down the street and turned about before Marcus looked up and realized where he was.

Number Ten, Chancellor Lane.

His heart flipped over inside his chest with violent force, and for a long, long moment he could not move.  The rain poured softly over his wool coat, streaming through the thick mane of brown-and-gray hair he’d let grow too long while he was away, as he stared at the impossibility in front of him and felt the past hurtle forward like a runaway train to forcibly collide with the present.

It had been a letter from the house-agent.  Three years ago, perhaps four. _“As we wish at all costs to assuage on your behalf the inconvenience of managing personal affairs from halfway around the world, rest assured that your family home remains, as ever, in good hands.  We continue to experience no shortage of respectable prospective tenants; fortunate indeed, as I am told the house across the street from yours has stood empty since its owner left the country and no tenant has yet been found.”_

Damn it all, he could have _asked._   “Which house?” he might have easily inquired in his next letter of response, with perfectly natural curiosity.  “Number Ten or Number Sixteen?”  But the thought had never occurred to him.  Rather, the image he held in his mind from all those thousands of miles away of home, of Arcadia, of Chancellor Lane, transmuted itself to accommodate this new piece of information: that Number Ten was now empty and its owner had gone.  The change had brought deep sadness with it - a sense of things changing irrevocably without him, of a past now lost as the world spun forward, of goodbyes he would never have the chance to say – but it was not unmingled with relief.  There were practical reasons, after all, why he might find it a blessing in the long run if the owner of Number Ten remained firmly in the past.  Just another memory of an England which no longer existed.  Just another childhood memory, gone for good.

But all of that crashed into rubble around him as he stood there in that rain-soaked street, staring up at the delicate lacy whorls of woodwork which frosted the porch of the house like sugar icing on a gingerbread house, and he knew then - with a sudden and astonishing clarity which echoed down to the marrow of his bones - that the picture he had held in his mind for four years had been mistaken all along.  Because he knew those green-and-gold damask drapes hanging in the drawing room window, that wicker chaise on the balcony overhead, those potted violets beside the door.  This house had not stood empty for years, in want of a tenant; this house looked identical, in every particular, to the way it had looked ten years ago when his carriage, bound for the seaport, took him away from Chancellor Lane for what he then believed to be the last time.  And if the drapes and the violets were still right here where he had left them, that could only mean one thing:

_Abigail Griffin still lived here._

A hundred thousand thoughts jostled against one another inside his mind, and the only thread he could tug out of the tangle, as he stood there staring blankly and stupidly up at the door, was the faint drumbeat of panic that perhaps all of this had been a terrible mistake.

Three houses on this blasted street, and himself and Abby in two of them.

Half of him suddenly and rather crazily longed to leap back into that godforsaken rattling carriage and be off before he was spotted, back to Hope Cove and Exeter and Southampton, back aboard the S.S. _Victoria,_ back through the Suez Canal and past Gibraltar and out into the wide blue ocean and from there to as far away as he could get from Number Ten, Chancellor Lane.

But it was the other half of him which made him do the thing he did next.

However startled the young, auburn-haired maid might have been to open the front door and find a tall, bearded, suntanned man in a days-old traveling suit sopping wet on the other side of it, the man himself was startled only slightly less.  He had not quite known he was going to knock until he’d done it, and then immediately wished he hadn’t.

“May I help you?” asked the girl, with a truly impressive level of composure and politeness; but since, of course, he had no idea what he was actually doing there, he was not immediately capable of a response.  “If you’re here to speak to my mistress,” she prompted gently, after a few long moments of confused silence, “you might leave your card.  She’s with guests for the evening but I can see that she gets it.”

 _Guests,_ he thought.  _Of course._   His mind had registered the signifiers – lights blazing in every window, the sound of a pianoforte from the other room, the distant buzz of voices – without considering what they meant.  He had only been thinking of _her_ – compelled beyond logic to see her face again, to hear her voice.  What to do or say when the moment arrived had entirely failed to occur to him.

“I haven’t a card to leave with you, I’m afraid,” he apologized rather awkwardly, beginning to realize how this all must look.  “I’ve only just returned from the Indies.  I live across the street, in Number Thirteen.”

“Oh!” Her brow immediately cleared.  He was a neighbor then, and not a stranger.  He watched her mentally redraw her first impression of him, adjusting it from “disreputable” to merely “tired and wet.”

“I shouldn’t have disturbed you,” he said uncomfortably, turning to go.  “I’ll come back at another time.”

“Of course, sir.  And who shall I say has called?”

“Marcus Kane,” whispered a low, stunned voice from the other side of the doorway, and Marcus felt his heart stop beating in his chest. 

He had not thought he would hear that voice ever again.

The young maid - turning to see her mistress standing in the foyer, staring with undisguised astonishment at the man in front of her - delicately recused herself back to her duties as the lady of the house made her way towards the front door.

“Good God,” she murmured.  “I never thought – Can it really be you?  After all these years?”

He was without words.  It had been Jacob, always, when they were children, who possessed the gift of charm, who felt at ease in any situation.  Jacob would have known exactly what to do and say here, would calibrate the exact right balance of propriety and intimacy to make sense of who they now were to each other after an absence of one-quarter of their lives.

But Jacob was dead, and the cable had not reached Marcus until it was too late to come home for the funeral, which pained him with such guilt that he had not come at all.  When the house-agent’s letter came, he had not been in the least surprised.  She would go somewhere else, begin a new life, far away from the shadows of her grief and her memories, and he would never see her again, which meant he was free to imagine her happy.

And yet here she was, aged not even a day.

Her gown was emerald green satin, cinched at her narrow waist and edged in black lace. He had been gone long enough for fashions to change without him, making her slender bare arms beneath the little black lace caps of her sleeves a revelation.  Her honey-colored hair was bound low at the nape of her neck and threaded through with ribbons of pearls, and the thought of how very like a mermaid she looked was so powerful that he very nearly said it to her aloud before forcibly arresting himself.

_For God's sake, man, get hold of yourself._

“Mrs. Griffin,” he said dully, with a stiff formal bow, and his voice sounded wrong even to him.  Her face changed subtly as he said it, reserve mingling with what might have been disappointment.

“After so many years of friendship, after a separation so dreadfully long – must we really be Mr. Kane and Mrs. Griffin to one another? Even now?”  A faint hint of teasing flickered into her voice.  “When we were children,” she pointed out, “you called me Abby and I rather liked it.”

“You are Mrs. Griffin to me always,” he told her, unable to press away the weight of sadness creeping in at the edges of his voice.  “I loved your husband like my own brother.  I grieved his loss with my whole heart.”  The ghost of a smile on her lips died as quickly as it came, and she suddenly could not look at him anymore.  “Forgive me,” he muttered, furiously hating himself for having brought that shadow into the depths of her dark eyes.  “I have no wish to remind you of sad things.  Only . . . I wish only to say – and I regret, with all my heart, that I took no opportunity to say this years ago – that I keep the memory of him alive in my heart.  Always.  As you do.  We have all this time, perhaps, been keeping him alive together.  And so you will always be Jacob Griffin's wife to me.”

She was profoundly moved by this, tears glimmering in her eyes.  “With such a bond as that between us,” she said softly, “how can you do nothing but stand upon my doorstep and bow to me as though I were a stranger?  If you will not call me by my own name, or permit me to call you by yours, will you at the least shake hands with me?”

“I will, and gladly,” he agreed, as she outstretched her small, pale hand; he took it in his own, and instantly regretted it, realizing how very little he was inclined to let it go.

Her skin was warm and soft, and the leap of her pulse fluttering in his wrist gave him a start; outwardly she appeared perfectly composed, but the hammer of blood racing through that ice-blue vein in her slim white wrist felt as wild as his own.

He held her hand for a long, still moment, trapped between coming and going, between bolting out the door back towards his carriage or clasping her hand tighter still to draw her towards him, close enough that he might, if he was brave enough, bend his head and –

“Mother, I’ve been looking for you all over!” exclaimed the blur of blue and gold which flew suddenly into the hallway and jolted to a halt in front of the open front door.  “What!” the voice uttered in astonishment, resolving itself into the form of a young woman with very fair skin and very fair hair in a silk evening dress the same cornflower shade as her eyes.  “Can it really be Uncle Marcus?  What an extraordinary surprise!”

He regarded the girl in silent contemplation for a long moment before he was finally able to speak – though it was her mother, first, whom he finally addressed.  “I spoke wrongly before,” he said softly. "It is not you and I, Mrs. Griffin, keeping your husband's memory alive. Not while he lives on with such dazzling clarity in his child."

Clarke Griffin looked up at him with a peculiar combination of confusion, sorrow, and fondness in those eyes he recognized so vividly as her father’s (though the stubborn little tilt of her chin was from a different source entirely).  Any thoughts of fleeing back to the carriage and the train and Southampton were now fled. "You must forgive me, Miss Griffin," he said, smiling at her. "I should like to believe myself above such maiden-aunt banalities as 'My, how you've grown.' But I find I can form no other thought. You were but a child when I left, and now I come back to find you so much a woman that I feel positively ancient.  I suppose it was not until this very moment when I realized how very long, in fact, I have been gone.”

“Very long indeed,” murmured her mother in a voice so soft the daughter did not hear it.

"I'm ever so pleased to see you," Clarke beamed as he bent to kiss her soft rose-tinted cheek (he could, after all, allow himself these simple, familial intimacies with his goddaughter which he could not with Jacob’s widow) and allowed himself, albeit with some resistance, to be ushered inside the house.

“I won’t stay and impose on you,” he muttered. “I’m not dressed for dinner.  I’m hardly fit to drip all over this hallway while you're entertaining guests.”

“It’s nothing,” said Mrs. Griffin.

“No, it’s all right,” he insisted.  “I’ll come back tomorrow.  I ought to get back and supervise my unpacking anyway.  See that the coachman and Miller put all the trunks in the right room.”

“The _trunks?”_ Clarke asked, puzzled.  “Have you only just arrived?  My goodness, was that your carriage we heard?”

“It was, yes.”

“You’ve not even been home yet?”

“I was going that direction, only the coachman let me out on the wrong side of the street, and I suddenly wished to . . .  But I shall call again later, perhaps tomorrow, when you're not occupied. I'm afraid it was unforgivably rude of me to simply walk up to the door like a salesman.”

“Not a salesman,” Mrs. Griffin corrected him emphatically.  “An old, dear friend I wondered if I should ever see again.  Please stay for dinner.  I should like you to very much.”  He looked down at his faded brown wool traveling suit with a rather dubious expression, and she burst out laughing.  It was her old laugh, her _real_ laugh, just as he remembered it - unforced and merry, cascading down over them like the ringing of silver bells - and suddenly it was as though no time had passed and everything was right again.  “No one will give a fig what you're wearing,” she said to him.  “And when did we ever stand on ceremony with each other?”

“Mrs. Griffin, my mother did not raise a son who would interrupt an evening party to which he had not been invited.”

"It’s hardly very much of a party," muttered the girl irrepressibly, and although her mother shot her a brief, scolding glance, she did not dispute the sentiment. 

“Consider yourself invited to the ball, Cinderella,” said Mrs. Griffin, highly amused at herself, “and your fairy goddaughter will find you something to wear.  Darling, go find Miller, would you?  I believe he’s in the ballroom, handing round sherry.”  And as Clarke scampered off, she laughed at the baffled expression on her guest’s face. 

_"Miller?"_

“Yours is still where he ought to be, I’m sure.  I didn’t poach your butler.  It’s Nathan.”

“Nathan?  Good God, no, he’s still a child.”

“Not a bit of it.  He’s twenty-two and a very competent footman, I’ll have you know.  Trained by his father, so despite a rather enjoyable tendency toward mischief he’s very good at his job.  He’ll take you upstairs and make you presentable, if anyone can.”  She reached up a delicate fingertip and brushed the thick salt-and-pepper bristle of beard along his jaw.  “Rather different from the last time I saw you,” she mused.  “I shouldn't have thought it would suit you, but I believe it does.”

“So you don’t plan to force your footman to shave me and cut my hair, then.”

“He will if you like, he’s terribly bored in a house full of women.  Let him do a bit of valeting for once, the poor boy.”

“And what do you suppose he could possibly accomplish in the way of trimming my beard and hair to distract from the fact that every other man in the room will be wearing evening dress while I, as you see, have nothing except a mud-stained traveling suit?"

“Miller will settle it,” she informed him.  “There are one or two suits of Jacob’s still hanging in the attic wardrobe which I am certain will fit you quite well.”

He was prevented from answering by the sudden realization of the meaning concealed inside those words: that either now, or at some point in their past, she had made enough of a study of his form to assess what size suit he might wear.  He looked away, blushing furiously, and a moment later so did she.

“I ought to go home,” he said again, this time beginning to mean it, but she shook her head.

“Please, Marcus,” she said, an urgency that sounded almost like fear in her voice, and the shift in tone was so startling that he could tell she had not even noticed her lapse into using his Christian name.

“What is it?” he asked her, taking both her hands in his, gazing down deeply into her eyes, trying to read what was concealed in the depths there, and then he forgot himself too.  “Abby, I’ve known you too long and too well for concealment.  Something is wrong.  Will you tell me what it is?”

“It’s nothing,” she said, shaking herself slightly as if to rid herself of the unpleasant thought.  “I'm sorry.  I shouldn't have . . . Truly, Marcus, it’s nothing.  Only it would be a great kindness to me if you stayed.  I would feel much more at ease if you were here.”

“Abby . . .”

“It truly is nothing,” she hastened to explain.  “Only that, for a pair attending a dinner in their honor, Mayor Jaha and his new wife are wildly unpleasant company."

“His _wife?_   When on earth did that happen?”

“A few months ago.  He moved away several years ago, to Paris.  And the house stood empty all that time, if you can believe it.  Apparently they had the devil of a time finding a tenant.”

“So I was told,” he answered truthfully.

“Well, I suppose I’d rather come to believe we’d seen the last of him, but he returned just last week and brought his bride with him.”

There was something puzzling in her tone that gave Marcus pause. “All right, out with it.  What’s wrong with her?”

“Nothing.  Nothing at all.  She’s perfectly polite.  Just very . . . foreign."

“Is she French?”

“I’m . . . not entirely certain, to be honest with you,” said Abby hesitantly, and when Marcus looked baffled she hastened to explain.  “She’s simply rather . . . odd," she confessed, "but I haven’t been able to put my finger on it.  You’ll see what I mean.  Her English is flawless – no accent at all – but terribly _mechanical,_ you know, as if learnt from a book. And she seems confounded at times by ordinary English customs, but not because she has customs of her own. If that makes any sense at all.  Oh, you'll see soon enough. She's not precisely ill-mannered, but she does seem always to be _watching_ one.  They’ve only been here an hour but it’s already become rather wearing, to tell you the truth.  So you see, you would be doing me a tremendous kindness if you stayed for dinner to tell us all about India, and give me someone pleasant to talk to, and see what you can get out of Thelonious about where on earth this Rebecca came from.  Please, say you’ll stay.  I know you’ve been traveling for two weeks and you deserve a good dinner and an early night and I’m being quite selfish in asking this of you, but I haven’t seen your face in ten years and I really cannot bear to let you leave the house so soon."

Clarke returned just then with a tall young footman in tow, whose face was unmistakably that of David Miller’s son – though, like the blonde girl beside him, aged in the decade of his absence nearly past recognition.

“Welcome home, Mr. Kane,” he said.  “I’ve sent Fox across the street to let my father know you’ll be staying.  Will you come with me?”

“Yes, he will,” said both the Griffin women in unison, so he sighed and gave in and permitted himself to be led away.

* * *

Marcus realized almost immediately that Abby had spoken no more than simple truth about Thelonious Jaha’s peculiar new wife. No sooner had he entered the dining room – his apologies for the delay rendered unnecessary by Abby’s smooth interjection of a fabricated story about a delayed train which led the guests to believe Marcus had been expected at the party all along - than the decided oddness of the evening became clear.  The other guests, all neighbors and village residents from whom he had been long absent, greeted him warmly and peppered him all night long with questions about India.  Only the two guests of honor, as Abby had warned him, appeared disinterested in acknowledging him at all.

Thelonious Jaha was, if not precisely a close friend, certainly an acquaintance of such long duration that they ought to have been happier to see each other.  For his part, Marcus was perfectly willing to be civil, even friendly, to the other man, but it was like attempting to converse with a wall.  Thelonious had always been a reserved man, but he had grown positively stone-faced in the intervening years, and there was something in his eyes that Marcus found unsettling . . . a kind of distant, remote coldness that was only enlivened here and there by flashes of something startlingly like fanaticism.  He remained largely disengaged from the conversation until, at odd and unpredictable intervals, a word would spark his attention and then the fire would blaze up inside his eyes for a moment, only to die down again. 

His wife was, if more consistent in her disinterest, even less convivial.  Abby had put her finger on it unerringly when she had expressed the impossibility of ascertaining anything about the woman, even upon a point so straightforward as where she was from.  Her response, upon being directly asked a question, was always the same – a delicate, birdlike tilt of her head, followed by an answer of as few words as possible.  Her voice was low and alluring, with a crisp precision that did indeed suggest she had learned English by rote.  Her speech was grammatically flawless but absent any idioms or colloquialism, and the effect was rather like speaking to a machine.  A very lovely one – all white skin and glossy black hair and lips as red as her satin gown – but rather inhuman nonetheless.

"That is a very unusual necklace," he offered, as a polite opening to conversation, regarding the odd silver pendant - like a sideways figure-eight - she wore at her throat.

"It is the mathematical symbol of infinity," she responded, and said no more.

"Yes, I recognized it," he said.  "Are you interested in the field of mathematics?  I myself find it fascinating as well."

"I was once," she said.  "No longer."

Marcus met Abby's eyes across the table and she gave a faint shrug which seemed to say, _See? I told you._

He tried again after dinner, catching up to her as the crowd made their way from the dining room into the ballroom.  “Where did you and Thelonious meet?” he asked.

“Paris,” she responded simply, and seemed inclined to give no more.

“Well, yes, I gathered that,” he pressed on, goaded almost into irritation by her unflappable air of – not _boredom,_ precisely, for she continued to observe everyone in the room with zealous interest, but a resolute refusal to engage as anything more than an observer.   “I suppose I meant _how_ did you meet.”

“I required a companion,” she said calmly. “After many years in the City of Light, I was compelled to be elsewhere and grew weary of solitude.”

“You were in need of a fresh start?” he suggested, attempting to decipher her cryptically blank words.  “Fall in love, move to a new country, explore different scenery?”

“”Explore,’” she repeated, tilting her head and regarding him quizzically, not answering his question.  “This is something men do.”

“I . . . well . . . yes.”

“You have a desire, do you not, to be the first among your people to find things, or to do things.  There is pride in this.  Am I correct?”

“I suppose so, yes.”

“This is why you left this village and moved to India for ten years.”

“There were a great number of reasons for that,” he muttered rather uncomfortably, aware of Abby’s proximity as she stood a few feet away conversing with Mrs. Sydney. 

“Why are you looking at Mrs. Griffin?”

“Never mind.”

“You do not wish to discuss her.”

“Not while she’s three feet away, no.”

“I make you uncomfortable,” said the woman, regarding him with piercing dark eyes, head once again tilted faintly to the side in that sharp, birdlike fashion.  She did not appear to be either apologizing or judging him, simply stating a fact; but since she was, in fact, correct, it was not a line of conversation he felt compelled to continue.

“How are you liking Arcadia?” he asked, rather desperately, attempting to shuffle the subject onto sturdier footing.

“There are very few people here,” she remarked coolly.  “It has already proved inconvenient.”

Indignant at this slight on his village, Marcus clenched his fists at his side to maintain his calm expression.  “I’m sure for someone accustomed to Paris, Arcadia would seem very remote and rustic,” he said tightly.  “But those of us who grew up here are deeply attached to it.  Your husband was once the mayor here, as I am sure you know, and I believe has always remained fond of it.”

“Thelonious is a man other men follow,” she said, with something like approval.  “It is a useful trait.”

“Yes, he always was, rather,” agreed Marcus.  “He has always been very well respected here.”

“And so he shall be when we return to the City of Light.”

“Oh,” Marcus said, surprised.  “So you don’t plan to stay, then?  I had assumed – “

“There is no pain in the City of Light,” she murmured, interrupting him as smoothly as if he had not spoken, something dreamy and peculiar in her rich, cool voice.  “Here, there is pain.  Everywhere else in the world, I see nothing but suffering.  Only the City of Light offers true peace.”

“I’m sure you’re right,” he said, rather helplessly, with no further idea how to continue the conversation, then took advantage of a brief glimpse of Clarke to politely excuse himself from Mrs. Jaha and bolt across the room to where she sat.

“Good God,” he said under his breath, “your mother wasn't joking.  What a bizarre creature.”

“Did she go all glazed-eyed to you about how mankind can only know true happiness in Paris or something of that sort?” Clarke laughed.  “I got that bit twice.”

“I’ve always been fond of Paris,” agreed the pretty dark-haired girl seated next to her, “but nobody on earth loves France _that_ much.  Not even the French."

“Oh, this is Miss Reyes, by the way,” Clarke said, making hasty introductions.  “Raven, this is my godfather, Marcus Kane.  He was Father’s best friend and he’s only just come back from ten years in Bombay with the British East India Company, representing the interests of the Crown on matters of international trade.”

Raven lit up with interest at the mention of Bombay, while Marcus struggled to keep his face neutral.  Clarke had been a girl of ten when he last saw her, and would never have been able to describe his work with such effortless exactitude unless her mother had at the very least mentioned him from time to time in his absence.  Had, at the very least, not forgotten about him, the way he had tried so hard for so long to forget about her.

“I’m very pleased to meet you,” said Raven.  “I’ve never been further away from home than this – I’m from Bournemouth – so I’m sure I’ll be such an impossible nuisance to you with questions about your travels that by the end of the week you’ll wish you’d never seen me in your life.”

“Raven is staying with us for the winter,” said Clarke.  “When she arrived it was quite dreary on Chancellor Lane, with the mayor’s house deserted and yours rented to strangers who mostly kept to themselves.  Mother and I had only each other for company and were going out of our minds.  But now it feels like old times again, with everyone back where they ought to be.”

“I’d like to send that Rebecca back where she ought to be,” muttered Raven under her breath, and Clarke laughed, shushing her.

“For heaven’s sake, she’ll hear you.”

“I don’t care.  There’s something odd about her and I don’t like it.  Have you noticed how impossible it is to get her to answer a direct question?  People only behave that way when they’re hiding something.”

“Then they both are,” said Clarke.  “Mayor Jaha isn’t acting any less odd.  So I suppose if there is a secret to be had, it’s his as well.”

She said it rather casually, but Marcus stared at her, gears whirring and clicking in his mind as the girl’s words began to sink in.  He had noted the peculiar behavior of the lady, of course, but it had not yet occurred to him to examine it in that light.  It was not simply that Thelonious had returned from abroad with a very unpleasant wife; it was the uncanny way she appeared to have altered him, making him somehow, bafflingly . . . more like herself.

It was extraordinary, and there seemed no accounting for it, but Marcus did not like it one bit.

The young trio of musicians in the far corner of the Griffins’ ballroom struck up a waltz, and Marcus watched Abby’s emerald green silk skirts swish and flutter behind her as she circulated through the room, urging her guests onto the dance floor.  Clarke, following his eyes, nudged her godfather with her elbow.  “Much as I would enjoy the pleasure of dancing with you, now that I am tall enough not to stand on your feet,” she said with amusement, “I really think you had better go ask my mother.”

“I haven’t danced with your mother since the day of her wedding,” he said with a flicker of trepidation.

“Don’t worry,” said Raven brightly, “I’m sure you’ve improved.”

Clarke laughed at this.  “Now, see, Uncle Marcus, here are your choices.  Either remain here on the sofa with Raven taunting you mercilessly, or go ask my mother to dance.”

“You may have grown taller since you were ten, you impossibly stubborn creature,” Marcus observed dryly as he rose from the sofa, “but otherwise you haven’t changed a bit.”

“Save for the beard, neither have you,” she retorted.  “Now go.”

And so he went.

He found her by the cluster of chairs near the pianoforte where the village’s respectable ladies of a certain age were gathered.  She was fetching tea and lemonade, retrieving dropped fans, and being generally charming, but he observed something in her air as he walked towards her that caused an ache of sorrow in his chest.  She was behaving as though these elderly women were her people – as though this corner of chattering busybody grandmothers and maiden aunts, observing the gathering without participating in it, was her proper place.

She was now on the other side of forty and had quietly accepted the belief that no man would ever ask her to dance again, even though to his eye she was the loveliest and most graceful woman in all the room.

Or the world.

Oh, but this was dangerous, he thought to himself.  Touching her hand alone had been potent enough; could he maintain his composure if given the opportunity to hold her in his arms?

Why had he not gotten out of the carriage at his own front door and gone straight to bed?

But it was too late for trepidation; he had arrived.

“Mr. Kane,” she said with perfect politeness, her genteel society manners firmly in place now they were no longer alone.  “May I say again how pleased I am you were able to join us this evening.”

“The pleasure is all mine, Mrs. Griffin,” he said, bowing low, but it was nothing like before.  His first bow had been stiff, awkward.  He had no longer known even how to be near her.  But now they had returned to calling each other by name.  They had clasped each other’s hands as ten years and four thousand miles of separation had fallen away.  This time, when he bowed and addressed her with proper formality, it was with something warm and vibrant pulsing behind it - as though they now spoke to each other in code, sharing a secret they could not reveal before the prying eyes of gossiping neighbors.  His bow said "Mrs. Griffin," but his smile said "Abby."

It was not the same as the first bow at all.

“I would be honored,” he said with with perfect propriety, “if you would consent to join me for a dance.”

She looked startled, and a flush of rose swept over her cheeks.  “Oh,” she murmured.  “I am greatly flattered, Mr. Kane, but I have not danced in quite some time.”

“Nor have I.  Come, we shall be out of practice together.”

“I am certain I can find you a more experienced partner.”

“Every other woman in the room who appears inclined to dance is already dancing,” he pointed out.

“Then I suppose I had better say yes,” she said, giving in with a faint laugh as he held out his hand, “for I should be a very poor hostess if I left you all the night with no one to dance with.”

“Your daughter declined before I even asked,” he said, leading her out onto the floor, “and I really could not bear a second rejection in the span of two minutes, from the same family.” 

She appeared to find this vastly amusing.  “You might have had better luck with Miss Reyes,” she suggested.  “She’s delightful company, and not yet married.”

“I’m old enough to be her father,” he said, reaching out to rest one hand lightly, with perfect decorum, on the taut, sleek satin of her waist as the current of the waltzing crowd overtook them and pulled them in.  “And besides.  There is only one woman in this ballroom for me.”

She swallowed hard, and could not meet his eye.

It was now, as it had always been, a pleasure to dance with him.  He led her with confident ease as though she weighed nothing at all, as though he had been doing this all his life.  He had always been remarkably graceful for such a big man, and in the intervening years he had lost none of it.  She found herself wondering whether he had found many opportunities to waltz during the ten years he had spent away from home, and then wondering why she should be wondering.

“Marcus,” she whispered, and felt the grip of his strong hands tighten against her almost involuntarily – one clasping her own, the other so warm she could feel it through the stiff green silk of her bodice.

“If we are not Mr. Kane and Mrs. Griffin to one another while we are dancing,” he said in a low voice, unable to look at her, “I fear I do not know what may happen.”

“You appear to think of Christian names as very dangerous things,” she observed.

“Not the names themselves, but the intimacy they signify.”

“We were children together.  We have known one another all our lives.  You were the best man at my wedding and godfather to my child.  Addressing me as ‘Mrs. Griffin’ does nothing to efface that intimacy.  It is stitched into every piece of our lives.”

“Maybe not.  But it does offer me what is becoming an increasingly necessary reminder that you still wear another man's ring on your hand.”

Abby did not know what to say to this.  She felt her cheeks flush and her pulse begin to quicken, though she could not immediately have said why, or even discerned whether the chaotic sensations simmering within her were pleasant or painful.  She could think of nothing except the dim, distant memory of the last time they had danced together, in this very room, on the day of her wedding.

He had called her “Mrs. Griffin” then, too.

They glided around the room for some time, an island of silence in a sea of noisy chatter.  Marcus thought he had never felt anything in his life as soft as Abby’s small white hand as he clasped it in his own.  Abby imagined layer upon layer of silks and muslins melting away beneath his palm, as though his touch seared away everything between her skin and his own. 

How extraordinary, she thought, that this evening should have begun with such a nightmarish quality – Thelonious unrecognizably altered with no explanation of _why,_ his wife’s inattentive rudeness bordering on inhuman, Clarke too discomfited by it all to assist her mother in attempting to forward any conversation with them – and then in a single moment, everything transformed.  Salvation.  Support.  A _friend._   A face as dear to her as anyone save her husband and daughter, albeit changed profoundly by time and care and absence.  The Marcus Kane she remembered had always been pale and proper and rather stiff.  She hardly recognized this suntanned and scarred man with his thick beard and that soft untidy hair she felt scandalously tempted to reach up and brush with her fingertips.  He had not entirely lost that stiffness and propriety, but he wore it badly, like an uncomfortable suit.  He had spent ten years away from this, away from British ballroom decorum and social etiquette, among people to whom he could simply say what he thought.  What would she find beneath, Abby wondered, if she could coax him into shedding that uncomfortable skin?

Well, he had returned to England, and by all accounts was here to stay.  And the next time it would be different.  Perhaps she would call on him tomorrow afternoon, for tea.  In his own house, with no Thelonious or Rebecca or battalion of keen-eyed village gossips.  Perhaps she would bring Clarke, around whom he appeared to feel more at ease.  Perhaps after he had slept and bathed and unpacked and begun to feel more human, he would go back to calling her “Abby” again.

She did not know from whence it had sprung, this curious feeling of unease, bordering on – well, she supposed she might as well admit it – fear, nor did she understand quite what it was about Marcus Kane that made her feel so entirely safe in his presence. 

She had no idea, then, how close she had already come to the truth.

She had no idea the evil she had begun, rather dimly, to sense was at that very moment watching her from the other side of the room.


	3. The Lost Girl

Abby Griffin could not have predicted, as she waltzed with her husband’s best friend and idly wondered whether she could coax him into less stilted conversation in a different setting, that the afternoon tea she was at that moment plotting was never to be.

She could never have predicted waking up the next morning to a panic-stricken Clarke standing over her bed, shaking her awake, a cluster of servants standing in the doorway with something resembling hysteria on their faces.

It took several minutes, while she pulled on her dressing gown and attempted to soothe her weeping daughter, to get the story out of them.

Fox, the young maid who had opened the door last night to Marcus Kane, had remained above stairs with the rest of the staff until a little after two, tidying up the ballroom after the last guests had departed and their mistresses had finally gone upstairs to bed.  The Griffin women did not like depriving their staff of sleep after long, wearisome parties; they always slept late and took a simple breakfast in their dressing gowns, to prevent the maids from rising at dawn to tend them or the cook from preparing a vast banquet while the kitchen was still in shambles from the night before.  The servants had stayed up another hour or so to get the upper rooms back into reasonably livable shape, and then stumbled downstairs to their beds and closed their doors.

So no one had seen Fox after that.  And no one knew why she was not in her bed this morning . . . nor why the narrow casement window above her bed stood wide open.  It had been the window that first alerted Jackson the butler that something was amiss, as the wind rattled and slammed it against the wall, so loudly that he could hear it as he made his way down the hallway to the washroom in the morning to shave.  Perplexed, he had sent in Maya, the upstairs maid, to see that Fox was all right; Maya had opened the door to see that the bed had not been slept in, and then chaos had descended upon them all.  Clarke had come downstairs to raid the larder for breakfast and been met by mass panic, so she immediately led them all upstairs to wake her mother and see what was to be done.

One of Abby Griffin’s well-known domestic peculiarities was an insistence on hiring servants who had no family (young Miller only excepted).  It was partly fellow-feeling – she herself had been young when she lost both parents and knew full well how difficult it was to make one’s way in the world without them – and partly a lifelong affinity for what her husband had fondly referred to as her tendency to "pick up lost strays."  Young people with their way to make in the world often went into domestic service quite soon after losing parents, she had found over the years; and while other, harsher mistresses might look down on a lady’s maid found crying in the larder on the anniversary of her late mother’s death, Abby Griffin simply folded the girl into her arms, held her until the tears were gone, and then insisted she sit down and have a cup of tea.  Demanding the employment agency send her only such candidates as she felt were in need of adopting sometimes caused additional household headaches, and she was forever having to train downstairs maids as lady’s maids or footmen as underbutlers herself.  But the benefit to this unusual arrangement was a particularly fanatical loyalty.  The young people who came to work at Number Ten, Chancellor Lane adored their mistress like a second mother.  She trained them well, with exacting standards, and the service in her household was always impeccable, not because she was a harsh or demanding mistress but because they took such pride in being able to please her.  Most would have been happy to stay forever, but Abby – who was moderately, but not excessively, wealthy – was always on the hunt to help them find better-paying jobs in larger households to give them a better living, so they tended to stay a few years at most. 

Fox was new, hired on just a few months ago when Harper, the previous housemaid, got a position with an elegant new seaside hotel in one of the neighboring towns, at three times the salary Mrs. Griffin had provided.  Fox was very young and had newly gone into service after her parents’ recent death from a brutal strain of influenza sweeping her village from which the young girl had, mercifully, been spared.  Because of her inexperience – not to mention her connection with a place of illness – no one had wanted to hire her.

But Abby Griffin was made of sterner stuff.

More to ease the girl’s mind than her own, she had paid for her to visit the local physician, who examined her thoroughly and pronounced her undernourished but in otherwise perfect health.  “There now, you see?” she had told the thin, trembling creature as she emerged from the doctor’s front door where her new mistress was waiting.  “You are perfectly well.   You have been through something very dreadful, but you have survived it, and you are safe now with me.”  Fox had looked up at her with an ache of gratitude in her eyes and Abby realized for the first time how frightened the girl had been that she was about to die, too.  “You are safe now,” she said again firmly, and finally Fox began to appear – bit by bit – as though she might believe it.

It was that moment which repeated itself over and over again on an infinite loop inside her mind as she bolted out of her bed, threw her morning dress on over her nightgown, and raced barefoot down the steps behind Jackson to the girl’s bedroom.  They had spoken true; it was deserted, and bitterly cold, frigid wet air pouring in from the tall window standing open over the still-untouched bed.

“I had an uncle once who tended to sleepwalk,” offered Monroe, the cook, as the other servants crowded behind their mistress in the hallway to peer in over her shoulder.  “I’ve never known Fox to do it, but it does take some folk at peculiar times.”

“But why was the window open?” asked Maya.

“Perhaps her room was overly warm, and she wanted air?” Miller suggested.  “She is closest to the kitchens, and the ovens were going all day.”

“Opened the window for air, in the midst of that terrible storm?”  Abby shook her head.  “It’s far more likely the window simply blew open.  Those casement latches tend to rattle; mine is the same.  Perhaps it wasn’t latched firmly and the storm caught it.”

“How would the wind blow it _outward?”_

“I don’t know,” she said, a feeling of dread creeping over her, “but we can’t delay another moment.  If Fox was sleepwalking, she won’t have known where she was going.  She could have had a fall, she could be lost  . . . Clarke, go wake Raven and tell her to dress, quickly.  We must organize a search.  Miller, can you get a note to your father?  And to Mr. Jaha’s butler as well.  We must ask if the neighbors or anyone in their households saw her leave the house or heard anything unusual.  Have you all had breakfast?”

They shook their heads.

“Eat something, and then come upstairs to the parlor,” she said.  “Bring everyone.  We must find Fox, before – “

“Before what?” Jackson asked curiously as her voice trailed off abruptly, but she shook her head.  She could not quite explain it to him, this mounting sense of anxiety and dread; she knew only that somehow, somewhere, Fox was in danger.  She could not have said from whence the thought had come, but she was unable to let it go.

Monroe cobbled together a hasty breakfast for the entire household – the ladies too ate in the servants’ kitchen, as they often did to save the staff from laying out a formal spread in the breakfast-room on the morning after a party – and then Abby led the entire party upstairs, where she found Marcus Kane racing up the front steps of her porch, trailed by both the Millers along with the Kane household’s entire staff:  Indra the housekeeper, his valet Bellamy, Lincoln the groundskeeper, and Bellamy’s sister Octavia, the cook.

“Marcus!” she exclaimed as he took her hands in his.  “Oh, thank God.”

“No one in my house saw or heard anything out of the ordinary last night,” he said, “or this morning, but we’ve all come to help.”

“I can’t tell you how grateful we are.”

“Jackson and I will organize the servants to divide up and search the village,” the elder Miller informed her in his warm, steadying voice.  “We’ve sent for the constable and the doctor – only if they’re needed,” he hastened to reassure her as he saw her blanch a bit at the words.  “And someone’s already run down to the pub, to see if anyone saw her come down the high street.”

“Thank you so very much.”

“We will find her,” said Miller, abandoning decorum ever so briefly to put a comforting hand on her shoulder, before leading his staff into the parlor to join the others.  Abby stopped the younger Miller as he moved to follow his father.

“What did Mr. Jaha’s butler say?  Did they see anything?”

“No one answered, ma’am.”

“What?”

“There was no one in the servants’ quarters.  I knocked, and then I peered inside, and then, well, I suppose I oughtn’t to admit this, but I tried the door and found it unlocked.  I didn’t go in,” he explained hastily, “I merely looked round.  But the servants’ hall was bare.  Furniture still under dust covers, no sign of a fire in the fireplace for months, maybe years.  Cobwebs everywhere.  Perhaps they haven’t any servants yet?  They are only newly returned, after all.”

“Damned odd,” muttered Marcus under his breath, and Abby was forced to agree with him.

“Thank you, Miller,” she said finally.  “You go with the others.  Mr. Kane and I will go call on the Jahas ourselves.”

* * *

Miller’s theory appeared to be correct.  It was Thelonious himself who answered the door when they knocked, with no maid in sight.

“Good morning, Mrs. Griffin, Mr. Kane,” he said with formal, unsmiling politeness.  “May I help you?”

“We’re very sorry to disturb you,” said Abby, “but my housemaid, Miss Fox, has gone missing during the night.”

“What a pity,” he said with very little sympathy.  “Run off with a boy, no doubt.  This is what comes of your capricious habit of hiring young people from unstable family situations.”

Abby had not thought it was possible for her to become even more upset, but his flagrant unconcern – indeed, his air of impatience at being interrupted for something so trivial as a missing girl – left her speechless with indignation.

“May we speak to your wife and servants,” she asked tightly, “to ascertain whether anyone saw or heard anything unusual during the night?”

“They did not,” he said evenly.  “Good day.”  And he moved to shut the door.

“Forgive me, Thelonious,” said Abby firmly, planting her foot against the door to block it, “but I should like to speak to your wife myself.”

“Why?”

“Because we have only just told you the girl is missing,” said Marcus, his voice too simmering with barely-repressed annoyance, “so you cannot possibly know whether your wife knows anything that may be of use to us . . . or, should it come to that, of use to the police.”

“My wife is not here,” he said crisply.  “I will ask her myself and will let you know if she has anything to say, though it is very doubtful.”

“When will she return?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“This is not a complicated matter,” snapped Abby, temper finally breaking free.  “A girl has gone missing.  We are speaking to everyone in the neighborhood to see what they may know.  I insist upon speaking directly to your wife.  If she is not here, tell me when she will return and I will come back to see her then.”

“She will return this evening,” he finally said, irritation flashing in his eyes.  “After sunset.”

“Then you will see us again this evening,” she said, turning on her heel and sweeping down the steps, Marcus following her, and did not even bother with a goodbye.

* * *

The day passed with agonizing, interminable slowness.  Octavia Blake, Marcus’ cook, made herself at home in the Griffins’ larder to lay out a cold supper for them all, as Monroe was still with Miller and Bellamy, who had not yet returned from canvassing all the farm houses on the outskirts of town.  Doctor Murphy and Constable Shumway arrived later in the afternoon; the constable made a thorough inspection of the girl’s room but found nothing at all to assist their investigations.

By now it had become clear that something had gone very definitely wrong.  Fox was conscientious and careful, and devoted to her mistress; she would not have disappeared of her own accord for any reason, no matter the emergency, without leaving any kind of a note.  But no one in the village had seen anything at all.  Marcus and the constable even drove out to the train station in Hope Cove, but the stationmaster and porters did not recognize her photograph and no one had purchased a ticket under that name.

For Abby, the very natural concern she was bound to experience under these circumstances was increased a hundredfold by the peculiar sensation – which she could tell Marcus shared – of something like _inevitability._  As though they had both felt an ever-growing certainty that something terrible was going to happen, and now it had.  There could, of course, be no real connection between that very sinister prickle of foreboding which struck them both so many times over the course of the previous night’s dinner, and the disappearance of a housemaid the next day.  But still, the conviction that their discomfort had been in some way a premonition left them both very distressed indeed. They said very little, to each other or to anyone else, but that they both shared the same mental turmoil was clear.

From time to time, Abby would linger at the window, waiting impatiently for the sound of footsteps or a carriage indicating that Rebecca had returned home, but none came.  Finally she decided she had had enough of waiting.  She left Marcus with the impossibly gruesome task of awaiting the constable’s report (he had rallied the men of the village to join him in dragging the millpond, and they were finishing up for the evening now that the sun had set), she stalked back over to the crumbling stone house next door to demand of Thelonious when his wife would be available for her questioning.

She was astonished, therefore, when Rebecca - clad, as always, in crimson silk with that curious double-loop pendant at her throat - answered the door herself.

“Hello, Abby Griffin,” said the dark-haired woman in her crisp, silvery voice.  “You wished to speak with me.”

“Yes, I did,” she said, unnerved as before by that peculiar air of near-inhuman formality.  “My maid, Miss Fox, has disappeared.  It appears her bed was not slept in last night.  We have spent all day searching the village, but have found nothing.  I came this morning and was told you were not at home, but I am attempting to query all the neighbors to determine if anyone saw or heard anything unusual.”

Rebecca did not answer, but tilted her head quizzically in that unsettling way of hers, and regarding Abby as though studying her.  “She is a servant,” she finally said.

“Yes.  My housemaid.  I told you.”

“And yet you display extreme personal concern.”

“Something terrible might have happened to her.  The people who care about her are worried.”

Rebecca did not appear to understand this.  “You hire only servants with no family.  This information is generally known.”

“She had no parents, true.  Like the others.  But she was a good girl and we cared about her very much.  She’s a human being, Rebecca, and she is missing.  Why on earth is this so difficult to grasp?"

“She fulfills a household task.  She is replaceable.  You may hire another servant.”

“Human beings may be interchangeable to you, Rebecca, but they are not to me," she snapped, hardly caring how rude it was, but the woman appeared as little aware of other people's bad manners as she was of her own.

“This is an unforeseen reaction,” said Rebecca as her husband descended the staircase behind her and made his way to her side.  There was something in the way Rebecca turned to look at Thelonious, with an air almost of _reproach_ , which sparked certainty within Abby’s breast that this woman knew more than she was telling.  “I was not aware that mistresses of the upper classes paid such close attention to their servants.  You are very upset.”

“What the devil does _that_ mean?”

“She means she should not have thought the disappearance of one girl should cause so much distress,” interrupted Thelonious smoothly.  “No doubt, as I said before, she has simply run off with a boy and was afraid to tell you.  Best let it go.”

“She did not run off with a boy,” Abby snapped.  “Her things are all still where she left them.  Her coat, her clothes, her money.  If she had meant to leave, she would have packed.”

“Packed,” repeated Rebecca curiously, tilting her head and regarding Abby once more with that precise, appraising glance.  “I understand.  Humans are attached to their possessions.  It is suspicious to you that she left everything behind.”

“Highly suspicious,” said Abby.  “Are you certain you did not hear or see anything at all out of the ordinary last night after you returned home?  Or this morning?”

“Nothing whatever,” said Thelonious.  Abby glowered at him, then turned to his wife.

“Nothing whatever,” Rebecca repeated, her inflections eerily mirroring her husband’s, and said no more.

Realizing there was nothing more to be gotten out of continued conversation, Abby returned to the house.  She told the others the Jahas had seen nothing; only to Marcus, after she had sent the girls and the servants to bed, did she recount the entire disturbing conversation, with all its peculiar implications.

“What could she have seen?” he asked, brow furrowed, pacing back and forth across the parlor carpet.  “If she knows something, why hide it?”

“I’ve no idea,” said Abby helplessly.  “None of it makes any sense.”

“The notion that she sees human beings as interchangeable makes my blood run cold,” he said frankly.  “There’s something positively inhuman about that woman.  I noticed it last night as well.  What the devil can Thelonious see in her?”

“That’s the trouble,” she said earnestly, leaning forward in her chair.  “Marcus, think about it.  The way they behave together, talk to each other, even the way they danced last night.  It’s true she’s a very lovely woman, but he seems hardly to see her at all.  He certainly doesn't appear besotted enough for this brief, whirlwind Parisian courtship to make any kind of logical sense.  Never _once_ has he looked at her like a man in love.”

Marcus faltered in his stride just for a moment before collecting himself and resuming his pacing.  “No,” he agreed quietly.  “He has not.”

But Abby, distracted, did not notice how her words had seemed to discomfit him.  “The trouble is,” she reflected, “that it’s as though the Thelonious we used to know has disappeared altogether, and whatever queer foreign mannerisms this woman brought with her are beginning to infect him.  The Lord knows I myself have never been wildly fond of him, though he and Jacob were friendly enough, but I would never have thought that a man who was once the mayor of this town should think so little of the disappearance of one of its citizens.  I cannot understand it.”

“Nor can I,” confessed Marcus.  “But I promise you, Abby, we will get to the bottom of this.  You are not mad, whatever you might have thought to yourself in your worst moments of fear.  And you are not alone.  I promise you.  I will not leave you to endure this alone.”

She looked up at him suddenly, hearing the throbbing emotion pulsing in his low, warm voice, and her wide brown eyes regarded him with a confused tangle of emotions swirling in their depths.  He took a step towards her, then another and another, until he had reached the chaise where she sat staring at him, a rosy flush sweeping her cheeks.  He knelt down suddenly and unexpectedly before her and reached out to take both of her hands in his own.  “I will not leave you to endure this alone,” he murmured in a voice so low she very nearly could not hear it.  Then he lifted her right hand and bent his head to kiss it.

Abby’s entire body felt hot and cold at once, her heartbeat pounding so loudly through every nerve and sinew that she felt certain Marcus could hear it.  His movements were slow – not timid, but deliberate, as though preserving the moment, taking his time.  She felt the whisper of his beard, coarse and silken at the same time, brushing the sensitive skin on the back of her hand, making her shiver, before the pressure of a pair of warm, soft lips melted into her flesh and her heartbeat crashed to a halt altogether.

Time stopped, for both of them.  They could not have said, afterwards, how long they remained there, whether mere seconds or half a century.  Nothing existed in this moment but the place where his mouth touched her hand.  Fox, Rebecca, Thelonious, were all forgotten.  There was just this impossibly delicate thing, this touch of flesh on flesh, sending oceans of sensation flooding through both their bodies and leaving them half-dizzy.

Abby had not been touched like this – with longing, with tenderness, with desire – in so long that she had given it up entirely.  She had loved one man and lost him and that was that.  It had seemed proper, sensible, to leave such feelings in the past.  But it was impossible to deny that Marcus Kane’s lips on her hand awakened an aching desire to feel his lips everywhere.  She was shocked at herself for thinking such a thought so boldly, but once it was there she could not deny it.  And Marcus, for his part, kissed her hand as though in all his life he had never kissed a woman’s hand before, as though someone had placed before him a rare jewel and he knelt to do it reverence, as though permission to press his lips to her white skin was a privilege conferred to himself.

“Marcus,” she whispered, unable to stop herself, and his eyes jolted up to meet hers as though she had startled him.  She had caught him unawares, he had no time to draw his mask back down, no time to conceal or obscure the wild, desperate desire swirling in the depths of his warm brown eyes.  He leaned forward, towards her, from the place where he knelt at her feet on the carpet, reaching both his hands to clasp her small waist.  She felt herself leaning in to meet him there, her hands clutching his shoulders for balance before sliding up his neck to do the thing she had caught herself yearning to do since she first laid eyes on him yesterday, tangling her fingers in the thick, lush softness of his thick brown hair.

He closed his eyes at the sensation of her touch, his face suddenly so vulnerable that she felt her heart turn over inside her chest.   _Oh, kiss me,_ she thought to herself in desperation, stroking his hair, leaning forward until their faces were so close that their foreheads brushed together.   _Please.  Please, kiss me._

His lips parted, drawing in breath, as though steeling himself, as though the moment had come and he was nearly ready.  She could feel, beneath her fingertips, his racing pulse hammering at his temples and behind his ears as she caressed the hard, strong planes of his skull - his head, cheekbones, jaw.   _Kiss me,_ she begged again in her mind, and he very nearly did . . .

. . . if it had not been for the screaming.


	4. The Veiled Lady

Though the _why_ of it eluded them, it was not all that difficult, after the fact, to piece together exactly _what_ had happened. 

It was clear, as Marcus and Abby tore up the steps at breakneck speed, that the commotion had arisen from the blue-and-white guest bedroom at the end of the hall which was currently occupied by Raven.  Though she had never in her life been prone to either nightmares or sleepwalking, she had awoken from a dream so frightening she was unwilling to speak of it, and found herself standing in her white nightdress in front of the wide-open window of her bedroom.  The peculiar circumstances surrounding the disappearance of Fox the housemaid still fresh in her mind, she had hastily slammed the window shut with a sense of wild and mounting panic, afraid that somehow, through some means she did not fully understand, some terrifying force was murmuring to her that she was to be the next victim.  She did not speak of these fears to anyone, but they made their home in the darkest corners of her mind and did not leave her.

It had been Maya, quite by accident, who had startled the scream out of her.  She had been on her way to bed before realizing that she had forgotten to carry up the ladies’ washed and pressed dresses for the next morning, and thought it better to do it now, even though it was so late, rather than risk them waking with nothing to wear. So she retrieved the neatly-folded bundles from the laundry, and - as she often liked to do - decided to pin a sprig of something pleasantly-scented to the lacy necklines of their chemises.  Today, however, with the whole house in chaos all day long in search of the missing Fox, no one had gone to clip fresh flowers from the garden, so there was nothing in the workroom she thought quite fresh enough to use.  Improvising, she snipped a few sprigs of the rosemary Monroe used for cooking from the windowsill-box in the kitchen, pinned them to the chemises, and carried the whole basket upstairs.  Abby’s room, of course, was empty, so Maya passed in and out with no incident.  Clarke was still awake - just that very moment about to climb into bed - and, after embracing the girl and questioning her closely to inquire how she was bearing up under the strain of this most utterly dreadful day, bid her goodnight, with a caution that she was very likely to find Miss Reyes already asleep.

But of course, she had not.

Raven was mortified and profusely apologetic for creating such a horrific disturbance in a house where nerves were already set on edge, and particularly for giving such a fright to Maya, who was a sweet and gentle girl Raven liked very much.  She felt very badly about the incident, but it was tinged with something more worrisome than mere embarrassment, for she seemed unwilling - or perhaps unable - to give a reasonable accounting for her own behavior. A start of surprise to find someone else unexpectedly in a room where one believes oneself alone, is, of course, entirely natural; but when Abby questioned Raven, quite gently, whether anything had occurred to elicit a reaction which extended so violently beyond that, the girl hesitated to explain herself.  Her reasons seemed, even to herself, foolish and hysterical.  But in a house in such turmoil, no one - not even Maya - saw fit to judge her, and gradually they managed to extract two rather curious statements: first, that the appearance of Maya in her white nightdress struck some chord within her related to the dreadful, harrowing nightmare of which she was still not prepared to speak; and secondly, most bizarrely of all, she had detected the faint aroma of rosemary from the laundry basket as Maya approached and it had struck her violently ill.  This was entirely new (there had been rosemary in the roast lamb at lunch and she had had two helpings), but there was no disputing the truth of it, for she appeared quite pale and uncomfortable until a perplexed Clarke unpinned the sprig of rosemary and dropped it out the window, at which point her friend’s brow cleared and she appeared much more like her old self again.

No one could account for it, least of all Raven, but it unsettled them all profoundly. Still, it might perhaps have been very reasonably set down as nothing more than a case of badly rattled nerves (a malady currently plaguing everyone in the house, if truth be told), had the incident not repeated itself the following night.

After another day of fruitless searching for Fox consuming all the household's energy with nothing to show for it, and spirits lower even than they had been the night before, everyone betook themselves early to bed very shortly after dinner.  Clarke woke in the night to the sound of footsteps walking about next door to her; fearing Raven's unsettled nerves had led her to sleepwalking, and hoping to catch her before she attempted to leave her room and risked a tumble down the stairs, she quietly opened the girl's door - without knocking - to see if she was all right.  She found Raven once more staring out the open window, but this time reaching out it, lips moving in a quiet murmur as though speaking to someone.  Clarke watched in astonishment for several minutes, unsure what to do; it was only when Raven stepped up onto the bedside footstool and made as if to climb out onto the windowledge that Clarke rushed over to seize the girl by the waist and pull her down, bolting the window before gripping the girl by the shoulders and frantically shaking her back to herself.  Raven did not scream this time; rather, she appeared overtaken by a curious, languid fatigue which left her confused - she had no memory of attempting to climb out the window - and rather feverish.  This malaise appeared to worsen overnight, and did not show any signs of lessening the next day, or the next.

Raven’s mysterious illness confounded the entire household.  She displayed some symptoms of a fever or influenza – weariness, disinterest in food, a marked preference for darkness and solitude over sunlight and noise – but they were coupled with other symptoms no one could explain.  She required the curtains of her bedroom to be closed at all times, but the window always open, claiming she needed the fresh air.  Rosemary was not the only herb which appeared to send her into violent paroxysms of nausea; others, from time to time, had a similar effect, though it was difficult to sort out which ones in particular.  She possessed a silver pendant on a chain in the shape of a bird in flight – a bit of a play on her name – which she had been given many years ago and worn every day since Clarke had known her; but now she found it inexplicably upsetting, and more than once the servants had retrieved it from the lawn where she had hurled it out the window during the night.

The sleepwalking continued, along with the nightmare – of which she still would not speak – and even Clarke's constant presence, sleeping beside her in the bed every night, could not dispel it. 

Abby was beside herself.  With every passing day that Fox remained missing and Raven grew more ill, she found herself wondering what bizarre confluence of circumstances had struck her otherwise uneventful household with one tragedy after another.  Over the subsequent days, she grew more and more reliant on Marcus for company.  He spent most of his time at the Griffins’ home, walking over after breakfast and staying until after supper, making concerted attempts to entertain - or at the very least, distract - the ladies of the house, with card games or conversation or reading aloud.  Raven, in her more lucid moments, remained wild with fascination about India; as it became more difficult for her to leave her bed, the others began to spend more and more time there, and many were the hours where Clarke lay beside her friend, stroking her hair, and Abby sat on the floor beside them, as Marcus sat in the armchair sharing his seemingly inexhaustible well of stories. 

Tending to Raven took up a great deal of Abby's time, so it was somewhat by circumstance that she found herself very rarely alone with Marcus during those days; but it was also, a bit, by design.  She had felt peculiar around him ever since the night of Raven's terrible dream, when he had come so very near to kissing her and she had so very badly wanted him to.  But he had not, and perhaps it was for the better.  She had a sense of something like danger narrowly averted.  She had not forgotten it - that almost-kiss haunted her, rising up before her eyes every time he was near her and even sometimes when he was not - and she knew from a certain something that came into his voice from time to time when he addressed her that he had not forgotten it either.  But it felt perilous, somehow, to give it much consideration at a time like this, when they both were in such need of keeping their wits about them.

Still, he did not call her "Mrs. Griffin" anymore, and that was something.

No, it was sensible, she told herself, to put that almost-kiss behind her.  There were others depending on her and she could not falter now.  Fox, Raven, Clarke . . . There was no time, not now, to wonder when Marcus Kane had ceased to be her husband's closest friend and become instead a man whose lightest, most innocent touch sent shivers along every nerve in her body.  She was grateful for the comfort of his presence but uneasy at the sensations it seemed forever destined to evoke.  And every time she came up the stairs to hear voices coming from Raven's darkened bedroom and saw the girls curled up together beneath the white counterpane as Marcus reclined comfortably opposite them in the damask armchair, telling story after story about the temples along the River Ganges as though there were nowhere else he would rather be in the world, the almost-kiss flared up brightly in front of her, shining like the North Star, and she knew Marcus Kane would never be the same to her again.

* * *

 It was on one such afternoon, ten days later, when the terrible thing finally happened - the inevitable tragedy they had all, in their deepest heart of hearts, been expecting all along - and, in so doing, set in motion the chain of extraordinary and sinister events which followed. 

After sleeping late and taking a bit of breakfast on her tray, Raven had felt well enough to come downstairs and lie on the sofa in the drawing room with the blinds drawn for a change instead of remaining in her bedroom, which had given Clarke some hope – perhaps premature – that her friend might be getting better.  Doctor Murphy had been to examine her the day before, for the third or fourth time, and though he remained entirely unable to detect anything medically the matter with her, he had left a few packets of medicine on her night-table, and to her friend's optimistic eye, it appeared they were helping.  The doctor had suggested bleeding her, to purge the fever, a proposition to which Raven had most vociferously declined (a violent reaction to the sight or smell of blood being among her new, curious symptoms).  She had insisted to him that such extreme measures were unnecessary, that in fact she had begun to feel she was getting well, and and it seemed perhaps as though it might be true.  Her deathly pallor had ebbed somewhat, and the roses were beginning to come back into her cheeks – albeit in a manner that appeared rather feverish, to Abby's eye, and still not entirely wholesome.  She was cautious, but Clarke was all hope, and she did not want to dissuade her daughter’s optimism. 

Still, on that fateful afternoon, Raven was enough herself again to join Marcus and Clarke in a cheerful, noisy game of cards while a vastly amused Abby worked at her sewing table beside them.  It was just coming on four and they were awaiting the imminent arrival of tea when a solemn, ponderous knock at the door - a knock that portended nothing good - startled them all out of their seats and struck unease into all their hearts.  All eyes in the room turned to Abby, whose duty it was to receive whoever this somber visitor might be; she rose slowly from her seat, setting aside her half-finished embroidery of winding ivy and white roses and making her way with what felt even to her like an eerily funereal solemnity into the foyer.  Afterwards, she would reflect that it felt to her as though she knew without knowing exactly what awaited her on the other side of that door, as though the train which had been carrying her - carrying all of them - for miles and miles had finally reached a destination so inevitable that the only surprise was how it could possibly not have come any sooner.

Constable Shumway had come himself, which was kind, rather than sending the lowly junior lieutenant who had made the actual discovery.  He followed Abby into the drawing room, hat in hand, wearing an air of cautious and reserved silence, waiting with great patience while Clarke ran downstairs to fetch all the servants.  He did not speak until everyone was gathered, and when he finally did, it was with an unsparing brevity that somehow made the dreadful thing even worse.

They had found her, it seemed, in the graveyard.

The vicar's groundskeeper, who tended - rather halfheartedly, it must be said - the mossy tombstones surrounding the crumbling old church on the edge of the forest, had stumbled upon the terrible sight quite by accident as he brushed cobwebs from the doorways of the once-grand mausoleums where Arcadia's oldest families entombed their dead.  There was a white marble bench in a little patch of grass near the center of the ring of mausoleums, and at first the veiled white shape lying upon it had confused the groundskeeper enormously, as though someone had inexplicably lain a statue there.  But it was no carved stone figure; it was Fox, still in her white nightdress, lying on her back with her arms crossed over her chest with an eerily peaceful air, as though she were merely asleep.  But there was something very peculiar about the corpse.  The young lieutenant had spotted it the moment the groundskeeper, who had accosted him on the street, pulled him over to have a look; and once the girl's body had been brought to the station and Shumway had seen it for himself, he had found himself in instant agreement.  There was no sign of decomposition - indicating that the girl had either died only recently, or been somehow perfectly preserved.  But that was not the strange part, Shumway continued, carefully explaining to the room full of horrified, tearful and utterly baffled faces what “exsanguination” meant.  There was not a single cut or bite or puncture wound anywhere to be found by their most careful investigation; yet, somehow, the girl's body had been drained of every last drop of blood.

No one in the room received the news unmoved, but it seemed to strike Raven more potently than anyone else.  She began to tremble quite violently, and even Clarke, beside her on the sofa, wrapping comforting arms around her could not quell the strange fit this news seemed to provoke.  “It can’t be,” she whispered, more to herself than anyone else.  "The white bench.  It can’t be.  It can’t be.”

Kane, seated in a chair beside her, heard the words and looked up with a start, meeting Clarke's worried gaze over the girl's bent dark head, where she leaned wearily against the blue-and-white striped cotton of Clarke's dress.  "What do we do?" Clarke murmured to him, too quietly for the others to hear.

"Do you trust me?" Kane whispered back.  Clarke, eyes wide and puzzled, nodded.  "Then let me speak to Raven alone."

"Do you know something the rest of us do not?" she asked him, and he furrowed his brow in thought for a long moment before answering.

"I may be wrong," he finally said.  "I hope to God I am.  If I am right, this thing is more serious than any of us can imagine.  But I have questions to put to Raven which she might, perhaps, answer more candidly without her closest friends present."

"Do whatever you must," said Clarke.  "We must have answers.  I trust my friend in your care."

* * *

 He got his opportunity almost immediately. 

Abby, as the dead girl's closest living connection, was left with the harrowing task of following Shumway back to the station in order to identify the body.  It was a mission she would have vastly preferred to undertake herself, sparing anyone else the horror of it; but she was unable to dissuade Jackson from accompanying her.  The butler had been with Abby longer than the rest of the staff, and the others felt certain that he would be the one, if anyone was, to stay forever.  His devotion to Abby was absolute, and though he had no relish for the prospect of facing a dead body, he certainly had no intention of allowing his mistress to face one with no support.  They left with Shumway, and Clarke helped the fatigued Raven up to her room before making her way back down to the servants' hall to see that the staff were all right.

Marcus passed Clarke on the stairs, squeezed her shoulder in a comforting manner, and then made his way down the hall to knock on Raven's door.

"Come in," said the girl, and as he entered she struggled to sit up.

"No, it's only me," he said, drawing his chair up to her bedside.  "Don't get up, it's all right.  Raven, I should like to ask you some questions.  And I thought, perhaps, it might make you feel more comfortable to speak of these things to someone who is - well, an acquaintance.  I suspect you have a fear of worrying Clarke and Abby, your close and dear friends, and so you have perhaps been keeping to yourself a great many things that might be very important."  The girl nodded, not looking at him, with an air somewhere between uncertainty and relief.  Marcus leaned forward and took her hands in his.  "The body of the girl lying on the white stone bench," he said gently.  "You saw it in your dream, did you not?  The night we first found you at the window.  The very night after she disappeared."

Raven looked up at him, eyes wide and staring.  "How did you know?" she whispered in astonishment.

"I knew someone, once," he said hesitantly, choosing his words with care, "who told me a story which possessed some striking similarities to this one.  It was many years ago, and far away, in the country of Romania, where I spent some months traveling for business.  I met a doctor there who had experienced more than one similar case.  I should like to ask you a few questions, to ascertain if they are in fact as alike as they seem.  Is that all right with you?"

"Do you think this doctor can help me?" she whispered hoarsely.  "Or is it too late?  Will I be next?  Will they find me there just like Fox?"

"It is not too late," he insisted firmly, holding tight to her hands.  "You are alive, you are yet yourself, and you are safe within these walls.  We will find a way to stop this, Raven.  You have my word."

"Then ask me your questions," she said, sinking back against the pillows.  "I will tell you whatever you wish to know."

"I am very sorry to do this," he began in a gentle voice, "but I must ask you to begin by telling me everything you can remember about that dream."

Her whole body stiffened at this, like a wild animal preparing to bolt, but he stroked her hair soothingly until her breath returned to normal and she finally managed to calm herself enough to speak.  "I was in the graveyard," she murmured.  "I was wandering alone through the fog, down the path which runs past the great stone mausoleums.  I stopped in front of one I had never seen before.  It was grand and gleaming white, as though brand-new, and I did not recognize it.  I moved closer, out of the fog, to see the name which hung above the doorway, curious to which family it belonged.  Instead, I saw there, carved into the marble, my own name.  'RAVEN REYES,' it said."

Marcus fought back a shiver at the sinister image her words conveyed, and she nodded, understanding.

"Yes," she said.  "It was very dreadful.  But it was not as frightening as that which was to come.  I turned in fright away from this shrine to my own death, and saw two shapes moving out of the fog towards me.  Struck with panic, I wished to flee, but found that I could not.  I stood rooted to the spot as these two veiled shapes made their way closer and closer.  One was a girl all in white, draped in a white veil; she did not appear to see me, but glided towards that very white bench of which the constable spoke, and laid herself down upon it exactly as he described.  The other veiled shape was a woman dressed all in red, with a red veil that obscured her face entirely from view.  She bent down over the the girl and kissed her mouth, and then the girl went still, as though dead.  Then the red woman made her way to me.  I was shaking with fright, desperate to run, but I seemed rooted to the spot.  She whispered my name, and then lifted her veil - but there was no face beneath it, nothing but emptiness.  I closed my eyes, willing myself to awake from this dream.  I felt her kiss my mouth, just as she had the girl in the white veil, and suddenly I felt the breath leave my lungs, as though I were drowning.  'I will return,' she said to me, and then she was gone.  That was when I awoke, to find myself standing by the window which I could not recollect ever having opened."

"And did she?" Marcus asked in a gentle voice, pressing her hands in his.  "Did she, in fact, return?"

"Every night," Raven whispered.  "She kneels beside my bed and kisses me and beckons me to join her."  Tears sprang to her eyes as she looked up at him.  "I beg of you, if you know of anyone who can assist me," she implored him, "please, please do not hesitate.  I am afraid of what she may make me do next."

"Make you do?"

The girl nodded, eyes wide and frightened.  "When Clarke found me that night, climbing the footstool to reach the windowsill," she confessed in a hollow, frightened voice.  "It was the woman in the red veil.  She was standing beside me.  She told me to jump.  She told me we would fly."  She swallowed hard, fighting back the tears springing to her eyes.  _"And I believed her,"_ she whispered to him.  "If Clarke had not walked in when she did, I would have done it."

"You are safe," he told her firmly, though with more confidence than he felt.  "We will keep you safe."

"Am I going mad?"

"No," he said.  "No, Raven, you are not mad.  You are as sane as the rest of us."

"Then what is happening to me?"

"I do not know," he confessed, pressing her hand in his own.  "But I will not rest until I find out."

* * *

Marcus did not come to the Griffins’ house the next day, or the day after that.  Instead, he spent the hours from dawn until nearly midnight in his library, surrounded by the contents of a wooden box he had retrieved from inside one of his as-yet-unpacked trunks of luggage.  The box was full of letters, all on the same paper and in the same hand, though postmarked from dozens of cities all over the globe and spanning several years’ time. 

Indra brought him his meals on trays, clicking her tongue in disapproval at the sight of him surrounded by stacks of books pulled from every shelf, the contents of the box of letters scattered on the desk around him.  He had sent Miller to the library in Hope Cove and to the vicar’s personal library as well, with a list of other materials he insisted the man find.  He appeared struck by some kind of wild frenzy of research, and none of his servants understood it.  Octavia prepared all his favorites but could hardly get him to eat; meanwhile, with his master spending the entire day in his pajamas without even dressing himself properly, her brother, the valet, had absolutely nothing to do.  It was two days before he emerged from his fog, the answer firmly in sight, and returned to the Griffins’ house intending to tell Abby what he had found. 

But he had been away from the world entirely, buried in his books, and a great deal had happened in those forty-eight hours which astonished him profoundly.  Maya, answering the door, seized his arm the moment he entered the house and asked him if he had heard the rumors racing throughout the village – of a woman in a red veil seen walking at night through the graveyard.

If the connection between Raven’s dream and his box of letters had not sealed it, this was proof enough that his dark, dreadful suspicion was very likely correct.  Raven had told no one else but him of her dream, he was sure of it; and since Maya informed him that there had been four separate accounts from unrelated eyewitnesses, the odds seemed very slender that the rumors of the red woman were some kind of game.

But it was the second piece of news – gleaned when Clarke raced down the stairs in hysterical tears and nearly collided with him – that made his decision to finally take action an absolute necessity.

In the two days since he spoke with her, Raven had taken a violent turn for the worse.

They had been compelled to restrain her, Clarke told him, with heartbreaking distress.  She had taken a pair of scissors to Abby’s embroidered sampler of ivy leaves – the work of the past month, and nearly finished.  She had hurled a paperweight at the mirror in her bedroom, and then had to be forcibly prevented from collecting the shards to do mischief with.  Miller had a scratch down his throat from her fingernails, Jackson had a bruised shin, and she had apparently said things to both Clarke and Abby that were so cruel, so malicious and vulgar that neither woman would repeat them.

Abby was with her now, Clarke told him; she had found herself unable to bear the girl’s presence anymore, so distressing were her vile, hissing words, and had fled downstairs to escape when she had run into him in the foyer. 

“Let me go see her,” he said, kissing the girl’s hair.  “Go downstairs and have Monroe make you a cup of tea.  It’s going to be all right, Clarke.  I promise.”

“She said such terrible things,” she whispered.  “She will say terrible things to you, too.”

“It’s going to be all right,” he said again, though his heart was full of trepidation as he climbed the stairs.  Clarke was a resilient girl who did not frighten easily; he had never in all her life seen her this distraught.

But the thought of Abby facing this suffering alone quelled any hesitation in his breast, so he made his way to Raven’s room – voices already audible from the hallway – and opened the door.

The change in the girl was unmistakable.  Two days ago she had been weary and frightened.  Now she was like a fiend possessed.  Rope bonds had been looped around her wrists and ankles to secure her to the bedposts; a necessary precaution, he realized instantly, for she appeared struggling to free herself from her restraints with a terrifying, almost supernatural strength.  Abby knelt beside the bed, vainly attempting to get the girl to drink some water – for Raven’s lips were cracked and dry with thirst – but every time her hand holding the cup came near, Raven screeched and writhed away.

Marcus, from the letters he had spent the past two days reading, knew upon the instant what was causing such a violent reaction.  “Let me,” he murmured to Abby, placing a hand on her shoulder and kneeling beside her. 

“Marcus,” she whispered.  “Oh, thank God.  I was afraid you had abandoned us.”

“Never,” he said.  “I have been, in fact, conducting my own investigation, and I believe I may be able to help calm the girl and get her to drink some water.  Will you step back for a moment, to the other side of the room?”

Perplexed, Abby nodded but obeyed.  Kane took the water glass from her and watched Raven’s reddened, furious eyes follow Abby as she moved away.  It worked.  In a moment, the violent hysterics subsided, leaving the girl limp and quiet and a little dazed.

“Drink some water, Raven,” he said gently, holding the cup to her lips, and, after a moment, she did.

“My God,” Abby whispered.  “What did you do?”

“Nothing,” he said, “except confirm a hypothesis.”

“What was it?”

“Your wedding ring is made of silver,” he said.  “While you were touching the cup with that hand – the hand wearing the silver ring – she could not drink the water.”

“How in God’s name did you know that?” she breathed, eyes wide, but he shook his head, looking from her to Raven and back again.  His meaning was clear – it was not safe to speak in front of the patient.

“Go down to the parlor,” he said.  “I will see that she drinks, and hopefully sleeps, and then I will meet you there.”

* * *

 

With no substances on his person to elicit a violent reaction from Raven, he soon managed to calm her enough to get her to drink the rest of the water - though she would take no food – and left her, he hoped, able to sleep.  He found Abby pacing back and forth across the carpet in the parlor, Clarke seated on the sofa beside her, wringing her hands. 

“She is resting, I believe,” he said as he entered, and the look Abby gave him – a heartbreaking combination of guilt, relief, terror, and something he thought, perhaps, might be like affection.  She was so plainly frightened, and so plainly grateful he was there, that he broke entirely with decorum and did something he had not done since they were children, crossing the room in three long strides to fold her into his strong arms and hold her close against his chest.

“I don’t know what to do,” she whispered.

“I’m right here,” he said softly.  “We’ll sort this out together.  I’m not going anywhere.”

“We can’t get her to eat, or drink, or sleep,” said Clarke helplessly.  “She grows worse by the day.  And she has no family who will take her in; her aunt and uncle as good as told us she was our concern now.  We are all she has.  But I do not know how much longer – “

“Let me take her back to my house with me,” he said, pulling a little away from Abby to look at her daughter.  “Indra has a great deal of experience as a nursemaid, and nothing distresses that woman at all.  Your household has already suffered one tragedy this week, and sleep is difficult enough to come by as it is.”  He looked from one to the other of them, eyes somber, realizing the time had come and he could protect them from the truth no longer.  “There’s someone I know,” he began hesitantly.  “A doctor.  A specialist in . . . peculiar cases.  Some of Raven’s symptoms – as well as what happened to Fox – struck me as eerily familiar, but I could not recall where I’d heard them before.  It was not until Raven told me of her dream that I put the pieces together. With your permission, I should like to write and invite this doctor to come stay with me, though perhaps under the guise of my relative; I feel strongly that we ought to keep such an investigation to ourselves until we know more.”

“And this doctor,” said Abby.  “Do you really believe he can help?”

“She,” said Marcus.  “And I believe so, yes.  If anyone can.  She has made rather a study of the peculiar and unexplained, and though her methods are unusual, she has one of the most extraordinary minds I have ever encountered.”

“What is her name?”

“Van Helsing,” said Marcus.  “Lexa Van Helsing.”

 


	5. The Sign of Infinity

“Mother, you’re going to wear a hole in Uncle Marcus’ rugs,” said Clarke, flopping back onto the sofa and heaving a sigh as she watched her mother pace up and down the length of the library, anxious and restless.

“I can’t sit still,” she protested.  “How can you sit still?”

“I’m exhausted,” said Clarke.  “I’ve scarcely slept.”

“Would tea help?” asked Marcus, tugging on the silk tassel in the corner to ring for Indra.  “It’s after four.  Perhaps if we eat something.”

“Tea would be heaven,” mumbled Clarke, her face buried in a cushion as she heaved another sigh, and even under these nightmarishly trying circumstances the two adults could still find themselves able to share a glance of mutual amusement that, apparently, there was no tragedy on earth powerful enough to sever the eternal bond between young people and cake.

Marcus’ doctor friend had arrived early this morning - after a journey of some three or four days from whichever village in Eastern Europe it was to which Marcus had dispatched his letter – lugging several trunks of books, scientific equipment and, according to Miller, a highly unusual amount of plant matter.  Several of her cases appeared stuffed with nothing but a wide variety of what he described as “sticks and leaves.”  She had immediately sequestered herself in the upstairs bedroom where Indra had been tending to Raven, and launched into conducting her examination and experiments. 

The Griffins had been faithfully promised a full report as soon as Marcus had anything to tell them; but they could hardly sit still in their own house and were going mad with impatience. Finally at noon, sick of waiting, they made their way across the cobbles of Chancellor Lane to, at the very least, pace back and forth with a chance of scenery, on different carpets.  But after four hours, even Marcus’ boundless patience was beginning to fray, and he was nearly at the end of his wits himself by the time the sound of footsteps was heard on the stairs.

“Here she comes,” he said with relief, rising to his feet, as they all turned towards the door and the Griffins got their first look at Dr. Lexa Van Helsing.

She was astonishingly young – very little older than Clarke or Raven – and Abby, who had formulated in her mind the image of a white-haired crone with gold-rimmed spectacles, was shocked to find a slight, serious-looking girl with honey-colored hair tied in a severe knot and a plain, but not at all unfashionable, suit of brown wool.  She had shed her jacket, it seemed, and the crisp white sleeves of her high-necked blouse had been rolled up to the elbow.  The heavy folds of her skirt had a sort of powdery substance about the hem, as though she had spilt something on the floor upstairs and then walked through it.  Abby wondered what kind of materials such a woman would use for such a cause as this, and whether the room might more resemble a chemical laboratory or a witch’s lair.

“How is the patient?” Marcus asked.  The young doctor looked at Abby and Clarke for a long moment before answering, her expression difficult to read.

“Do you trust them?” she asked him unexpectedly, startling them all.

“Of course.”

“With your _life,_ Marcus,” she said sternly.  “Think before you answer.  This task upon which we embark is nothing less than life or death, and the things I have to say will shock you.  I will not speak before any persons you deem untrustworthy.”

“There is no one on God’s earth,” Marcus said in a low voice, his warm brown eyes meeting Abby’s and causing an unexpected flutter in her chest, “whom I would rather have at my side on such a quest than Mrs. Griffin.  I have known her since childhood and would trust her with my life."

"Her daughter was no more than a child when you left for London," said the girl, looking Clarke up and down rather critically, "so your proper adult acquaintance has therefore been only of a few weeks' duration."

"I would put my life in Clarke Griffin's hands without a moment's hesitation," he said evenly, and his words were so plainly no more than truth that they appeared to have the desired impact.  Van Helsing looked both women over with a piercing, appraising eye, before finally giving a curt nod and taking a seat in one of the leather armchairs beside the fire, gesturing to the others to sit around her.  “I have not eaten since the train,” she said, “and the story I have to tell you is a long one.”

“Tea is on its way.”

“Thank you.”  She turned and looked at Clarke with a curious expression.  “Raven speaks of you," she told her.  Clarke stiffened at this.  "She moves in and out of herself – sometimes as sane as your or I, sometimes possessed of the strange fits about which Marcus wrote to summon me.  But your name is often on her lips.”

“She is my dearest friend,” said Clarke in a soft voice.  “I do not know what strange illness has befallen her, but the things you may have heard her say – I imagine they may have been very terrible, but I implore you to believe me, Dr. Van Helsing, that is not who she really is.”

“Of course not,” said the doctor simply, arching her brow in surprise, as if such a thing were obvious.  Something in her tone caused both mother and daughter – and Marcus, too – to collapse internally with relief.  She was young, true, but there was something refreshingly straightforward about her, something the two women found themselves inclined to trust.  And it was heartening in the extreme to hear someone so obviously sane confirm the thing they all knew – that a force which was not Raven had taken hold of her, and that this was no ordinary illness which they faced.

Indra entered just then with the tea-cart, and for a few minutes all was pleasant chaos.  After the consumption of a truly staggering number of salmon paste sandwiches, lemon tarts, and scones with cream, they all felt better, and even the doctor became almost convivial.  Once Marcus had dismissed the servants, and asked not to be disturbed again until dinner, they settled in with fresh cups of tea and Dr. Van Helsing sat back in her chair to make her report.

“I have a great deal to tell you,” she informed them curtly, “but I first must exact of you a promise.  You are educated modern people, with rational minds, and the things I am about to say will sound strange to you.  I ask that you hear my tale in its entirety before you dismiss it.”

“Of course,” said Marcus immediately.  Clarke looked at her mother, and Abby looked back, each reading the same question in the other’s eyes – _what on earth could Dr. Van Helsing possibly have found?_ – but they both spoke their agreement, which the young woman in the leather chair received with a curt nod.

“I have spent my life studying the peculiar and the unexplained,” she began.  “I had as my mentor from youth a scholar by the name of Titus, who trained me in many skills and studies which you would find quite astonishing.  He taught me many things about the world which ordinary men and women live all their lives without knowing.  Things, perhaps, after all this is over, you would prefer never to have known.  Things your rational mind will wish very much to push back into the shadows, as childhood fairy stories or old legends.  But when a thing is true, no matter how much we wish not to believe it, denying the facts does no good.”

Abby felt a curious sensation of mounting dread spread through her bones at the calm yet somehow oddly sinister tone of the young doctor’s voice.  The girl took a sip of her tea and reached for another cucumber sandwich before continuing, which humanized her somewhat and made Abby feel a little comforted.  It is difficult to be afraid of someone while they are eating a cucumber sandwich, after all.

“I met Marcus four years ago, in Romania,” the girl went on, “in a small village in the Carpathian Mountains.  He was passing through on his way to Budapest, and had been stranded by a train mishap in the middle of nowhere.  We were the only two English people staying in the inn, and naturally fell into conversation.  I shared with him a great deal about the work which had brought me to Romania, and I believe the reason he sent for me now is that he recognized – quite correctly – that he had stumbled upon an identical case.”

She looked over at Marcus, who nodded his agreement.

“I will confess that a great many of the things you told me that night struck me as old wives’ tales,” he admitted frankly.  “And although over the years I have greatly enjoyed our correspondence, I nevertheless believed you to be on a rather quixotic and superstitious quest, finishing the work your old mentor had not yet completed before his death.  I admired you for your loyalty to his memory, without ever quite believing in the scientific merit of the cases you set before me.  Yet after observing Raven’s shockingly altered behavior, and hearing the tale of her dream, I suddenly began to wonder if . . . well, if perhaps I had all along been mistaken.  And I knew that, no matter what ailed the girl, in you and you only could I confide my worst suspicions without being taken for a madman.”

“You did quite right,” said the young doctor.  “No priest or surgeon can cure what ails Raven Reyes.  But you summoned me just in time, and there is still hope.  We can save your friend, rid the world of a poisonous, corrosive evil, and complete the work my mentor left unfinished, all at once.”

“How?” demanded Clarke.  “We will do anything you ask.  But please, tell us what you have discovered.”

“The symptoms Marcus described were very clear,” said Van Helsing. “Raven cannot bear the touch of silver or the presence of sunlight.  Plants and green things seem to annoy her, though Marcus was unable to specify which ones in particular, other than rosemary.  Ivy as well, I suspect, given the fate of Mrs. Griffin's embroidery.  She has a preoccupation with the window in her bedroom, though I have wreathed it for the moment with blackberry and ivy leaves; she finds it very unpleasant, but it has kept her away from the window, which is more urgent than you know.  You shall soon hear why.  She also, I was informed, experiences violent fits, and, perhaps most tellingly, she has developed a streak of vicious and outspoken cruelty which I’m told is wildly out of character for her.  In addition to all this, my medical tests detected another symptom which Marcus did not mention in his letter, and which, perhaps, you may not yet have had an opportunity to observe.”

She reached down into the pocket of her heavy wool skirt and pulled out a glass vial, stoppered with a heavy cork, which held a few drops of some viscous, jet-black substance.

“Good God!” exclaimed Marcus.  “What the devil is that?”

“Raven’s blood,” said the doctor calmly, as they all stared blankly in horror.  “The other symptoms could be ambiguous, possibly, but of the black blood there can be no mistake.  This all points quite clearly to the first reported case of this specific affliction in many years.  I have not seen such a case in some time,” she said, a peculiar tightness coming into her voice for a moment before disappearing again.  “I believed it – hoped, rather – to be dormant, or even erased.  But now that I am here and have seen the girl with my own eyes, I recognize in every sign and symptom an indication that a long-gone evil has returned to our shores.”  She looked rather pointedly at Clarke and Abby.  “The things I am about to tell you are distressing,” she said flatly.  “You will be tempted to disbelieve, or perhaps to tell others of the things you have heard.  I can proceed no further without your assurances that you will say nothing of this outside this room.  Not to your friends, not to your servants, not in any public place.  Not even to Raven, while her mind is not her own.  These matters are to be discussed among the four of us and no others.  Have I made myself perfectly clear?”

They all nodded their agreement as the young woman helped herself to another cup of tea, before settling back in her chair to tell her tale.

“By the end of his life,” she began, “Titus had become obsessed with one mystery he could not solve – a scattering of mysterious reports, all throughout Europe, of a veiled woman dressed all in red seen walking at night through a graveyard.  Without fail, her visits were followed by horrific and peculiar happenings.  Crops and livestock died very suddenly.  Women and children fell into dreadful fever states from which they never recovered.  And, most troublingly, the dead themselves would sometimes wake to follow her.”

They stared in astonishment.

“Titus compiled an extensive library of newspaper clippings and reports of any sighting of the woman in red,” she went on.  “This was his greatest life’s work, which I inherited after he died.  He followed each tale, traveled all over Europe, and if he found the dead rising from their graves in the wake of a visit from the woman in red, he was forced to take . . . drastic measures.”

“What must one do?”

“Better that you not know,” she said darkly.  “It is bloody, gruesome work.  But once the dead have been woken, they must be forced back into their rest, or the dangers will be immeasurable.”

“How many have there been?”

“He was able six times to save souls from the woman in red and return them to God,” said Lexa.  “And his own father four times before that.” Marcus stared blankly, and she nodded. “Yes,” she answered.  “I see the question you are forming, and I will answer it.  The woman in red appears young and beautiful, but her appearance is deceiving.  These hauntings have occurred for ninety-seven years.”

“How on earth is that possible?”

“Such creatures are more common than you know _._ They have walked among us, unknown to ordinary men and women, since the dawn of time.  The Greeks and Egyptians told tales of them.  The Celts called them the _neamh mairbh._ In Norse legend, she is _aptrgangr_ – the ‘again-walker.’  They dwell even as far distant as the West Indies, where she is called _la soucouyant_ or _loup-garou._ In Hungary and Romania, the stories have merged with the folk superstitions of the _vampyr._  The tales vary in the particulars, but not in essentials.  These creatures have always existed.  But the woman in red is . . . different.  She is the most powerful Titus ever studied.  He never encountered her directly, though he saw the horrors she left in her wake; but it was the great work of his life to hunt her down and destroy her once and for all.”

“What is she?”

“Titus called her a _revenant_ ,” said Lexa.  “The name is taken from the Latin, _reveniens._  Loosely translated, it means ‘the ones who return.’”

Abby felt a shiver run down her spine at the girl’s matter-of-fact tone.

“In life, she was a French noblewoman.  Born in Paris in 1763.  Her parents were scholars, and raised her with the finest education money could buy, no matter that she was a woman.  She grew up to be a brilliant chemist and inventor. But in fighting against evil, she became herself the greatest evil Europe has ever known.”

“What do you mean, ‘in life?’”

“She died ninety-seven years ago, at the age of thirty.  That was where it all began,” the doctor explained.  “She discovered a new chemical, one that had never before been seen in our time.  It had the potential, if harnessed properly, to serve as a source of endlessly-regenerating power.  Just one vial could fuel a small city for five to ten days.  It was extraordinary.  It could have been the greatest humanitarian advance of the nineteenth century.  And I believe, in her heart, she wanted her invention to do good.  But she was also proud, and pride made her careless.  She made a fatal mistake.  In attempting to distill this chemical down to an ever-more-concentrated state, her experiment went awry.  A vial broke, causing her new invention to react unexpectedly with another element, which turned it into a gaseous state.  She was no longer able to contain it.  The entire Thirteenth Arrondissement was evacuated, and nearly three hundred people were poisoned to death by the gas.  Including its inventor, who was found dead on the floor of her own laboratory days later.”

“So she did really die?” asked Clarke.  “Died, and then came back?”

“Died, and came back as something different altogether,” agreed Van Helsing.  “Something more dangerous than any mortal being you have ever known.  A Romani vampire would be a simple case compared to this one; but the woman in red cannot be repelled with mere blossoms of garlic around your window.  A vampire’s body sleeps peacefully during the day, and can be easily destroyed while it remains at rest.  But the revenant’s corporeal form is not sleeping in a convenient coffin, waiting patiently for a stake through the heart the moment the sun comes up.  This will be a quest that tests our strength and our intelligence to the utmost limit.”

“Is there a way to destroy her?  Is it possible to save Raven from the sickness which has befallen her?”

“It will not be easy,” cautioned the doctor.  “But it is possible.  No one knows what truly causes a revenant to be brought into the world, but my mentor has studied them at great extent and has learned that they behave in predictable, consistent ways.  The revenant has burned her own mortal corpse into ash, and distributed that ash amongst a number of different seemingly-ordinary objects, with which she always travels.  She is anchored to them, and travels as they do.  Destroy one, and you weaken her.  Destroy them all, and you destroy herself.”

“How many are there?  And how on earth shall we find them?”

“Titus believed there were thirteen.  In his notes I have read a great number of theories and I believe I have a clear picture of several, though not all.  Remember, the revenant’s corporeal form is not like that of a human, such as you or I.  She needs a mortal companion to carry at least one of these items with her.  Titus named them the _‘neb ankh,’_ the Egyptian word for a burial sarcophagus, but they are unlikely to resemble such a thing.  Titus believed one to be an hourglass, for example.  Another had to do with ships – a painting, a toy ship in a bottle, something of that nature.  He deciphered many ancient runic texts and symbols with different meanings: ‘ice,’ ‘leaf,’ ‘boat,’ ‘tree’ – for clues as to what each item might be.”

“Must we destroy all thirteen in order to kill the revenant and free Raven from her power?”

“We must.  It is the only way.”

“But how shall we find them, if we cannot even identify what they are?  Thirteen ordinary objects, which could be anywhere.  And time is running out for Raven to survive.”

“If we destroy the _neb ankh_ which was in her possession when Raven was attacked, it will loosen her grip enough for Raven to be brought back to herself,” said Van Helsing.  “Mind you, she will not be cured; she will still be vulnerable to the revenant’s influence.  But the Raven you knew will be in control once more.  She will no longer be a danger to others or herself.  And, most importantly, she may possibly retain a link with the revenant which will make her excessively valuable as we hunt her down.”

“If we do not even know what this spirit looks like,” said Clarke, “how on earth can we identify these mysterious objects?  It seems a hopeless case, Dr. Van Helsing.”

“The _neb ankh_ are each marked with the sign of the revenant’s immortality,” said the young woman.  “It is a symbol I believe you have encountered before.”  And she pulled a small, worn leather journal from the satchel at her feet, flipping through it until she found what she sought.  “This is the mathematical symbol for infinity,” she said, pointing to a curved double-loop shape sketched in black ink in the midst of a sea of runes and other odd markings.  “It is her marker and insignia, and somewhere on each of the thirteen vessels we will find it.”

“Oh God,” whispered Abby, blood racing with horror as the truth dawned on her.  “I have seen this symbol before.  I know this sign.  We all know it.”

Van Helsing nodded.  “You believed I was telling you a distant legend,” she said somberly, “instead of the simple truth.  In death, she is the Woman in Red who haunts the earth by night, leaving terror in her wake.  In life, she was called Rebecca.  The greatest danger this world has faced in centuries is even now across the street from this very house.”


	6. The Silver Ring

They remained sequestered in the library, deep in discussion, until Miller came to summon them for dinner.  Lexa explained that a revenant could not cross the threshold of any house unless explicitly invited by its master or mistress; once an invitation had been given, however, if she had determined that the house contained likely prey, she would leave behind a _neb ankh,_ which would permit her ever after to enter undetected and wreak her mischief.  There must be one somewhere in Number Ten, left on the night of the dinner party, which had permitted her to enter the bedrooms of Fox and Raven, coaxing them to follow her out the open windows. 

But fortunately for them all, she had never set foot in Marcus Kane’s house.

After an obsessively thorough examination, Lexa finally pronounced it safe, and Marcus sent word to the servants that the Griffins would be staying with them.  Raven had been given the largest guest bedroom, where a cot had been pulled in for Lexa.  Clarke had the room next door to it, and Marcus had given over his own bedroom to Abby, refusing her protestations and insisting he would be perfectly content on the library sofa.

Lexa had a seemingly infinite number of questions for, and about, the servants.  Lincoln and the Blakes were new, and more significantly – in keeping with what appeared to be Rebecca’s preference – they were _young,_ which could prove dangerous to themselves or to the others.  Under the guise of concern that there was a kidnapper of young women roaming loose in the village, and predicting correctly that Octavia’s brother and her sweetheart would immediately consent to remove her from danger, he managed to bundle them off with little trouble to the inn at Hope Cove until he should send word for them to return.

Indra and Miller, however, had been with the Kane family for years, and Marcus trusted them with his life.  They were not young, and were unlikely to prove tempting prey to Rebecca; they had observed enough, moreover, of the goings-on around them to realize their master and his friends were in some kind of trouble, and while they could do nothing to help combat a fiendish supernatural peril, they could at least make sure everyone was fed.  So they too were given a thorough examination by Lexa, who tested their blood, found it red and healthy, and finally permitted them to stay.

Revenants were known to possess extensive mind control powers, Lexa cautioned them all, but fortunately there were preventative measures for this – which, unbeknownst to them, they happened to possess already.  _“A Talisman of Silver, Bless’d”_ read the scrawled note in Titus’ crabbed handwriting on the faded pages.  That is, an item made of pure silver which once belonged to a person who had been loved and lost.  “A dead person whose protection you would have trusted in life,” said Lexa in her plainspoken, matter-of-fact way, as though this were an entirely ordinary thing to say, heedless of the complicated emotions of grief it seemed to awaken in everyone around her.

Abby’s wedding rings (both her own, which she still wore around her finger, and Jacob’s, which she had worn on a chain around her neck every day since he died) were silver, which meant she was safe as long as she wore them.  And his protection extended to Clarke, too; the sterling silver pocketwatch which her father had worn at his waistcoat now hung heavily around her neck, shielding her with its magical properties while comforting her with its solid, reassuring weight.  And Marcus, pulling out from the back of his wardrobe a small, rough-carved wooden chest of childhood treasures, hunted through the pile of old chess pieces, seaside shells, childhood drawings and the little wooden dog Jacob had whittled for him for his tenth birthday, until he located what he sought – a sterling silver rosary his Catholic mother had given him for his christening.  It had lived at the bottom of that trunk most of his life, concealed from his fiery Protestant father; but as he looped it around his wrist and felt the cool metal against his skin, it felt right to him that it should be Vera who would keep him safe from danger now, if anyone could. 

Miller’s wedding ring and Indra’s mother’s earrings marked them too as safe.  Even Raven was in possession of a talisman, though she objected with violent hysterics to permitting it anywhere near her.  But the silver pendant of a bird in flight she often wore had been given to her many years before by a boy she loved who had since died.  Rebecca had coaxed her into abandoning it, hurling it out the window to get it as far away from her as she could; but Lexa was not so easily fooled.  The silver raven was found and retrieved and nailed to the wall above the bed to which the sweating, hissing girl lay tied by the wrists and ankles, shrieking in fury as though its very presence pained her.  Abby could hardly bear to remain in the room with her for longer than a few moments, but Clarke - who seemed braver and calmer, now that help had arrived - felt compelled to stay, sitting patiently in the corner of the room as Lexa went about her work, ignoring the crazed rantings from Raven’s mouth and murmuring calm reassurances to her that she would be well again soon.  

Abby asked Lexa if she herself possessed a talisman.  The young woman did not speak, but tugged at a thin chain around her neck to lift from beneath her collar a delicate silver pendant in the shape of a letter C.  She said nothing, replaced it beneath her blouse almost immediately, and never acknowledged it again, but everything Abby needed to know was there in the tight clench of Lexa’s jaw as she stalked furiously away.  Not for the first time, Abby wondered what it might be, this peculiar fire of intensity that simmered within Lexa Van Helsing at every moment of the day; surely, there was something behind her single-minded focus on hunting Rebecca that meant more to her than simply completing her mentor’s work.  She wondered about the silver C – a letter found nowhere in the girl’s own name, nor that of any person she had ever mentioned.  She wondered why the doctor’s hatred for Rebecca felt so deeply personal. And she wondered how Lexa had come to discover that black blood was a symptom in the first place.  Lexa would never tell her, she was sure; but she thought, perhaps, she already knew.

Thus was Number Thirteen, Chancellor Lane finally deemed to be safe from the revenant’s poisonous influence, its inhabitants – all except the one already afflicted – safe within its walls from all harm.

Number Ten, however, was another matter.

It had been Rebecca at the door that day, when Abby first knocked to introduce herself and invite the couple to dinner.  This meant, troublingly, that the revenant had been invited to cross the threshold by the mistress of the house and could therefore return undetected anytime she liked – something she had already done to their knowledge at least twice. Marcus was wild with panic at the thought of Clarke and Abby spending even one more night in rooms which might well have a _neb ankh_ concealed somewhere within them, and into which Rebecca might transport herself at any moment; but Lexa reminded him of the vital importance that the Jahas suspect nothing amiss.  The Griffins could not be seen to take up residence in Marcus Kane’s house for no good reason; apart from the question of propriety, it would flag Rebecca’s suspicions right away.  If she bolted, all hope was lost, as every _neb ankh_ would go with her.  And since everything Raven knew, Rebecca knew, Clarke and Abby would have to conceal their continued presence in the house even from her.  They needed a plausible excuse to leave in a hurry, and then a way to get Thelonious out of his own house to conduct a daylight search, when Rebecca would be in her weakened and dormant state concealed in her own home.  This was their best chance to locate the talisman which the revenant had with her when Raven was infected, and whose destruction was their only hope of bringing their friend back to them.

After lengthy discussion, they finally arrived at a plan.  A telegram was written by Abby, which Marcus arranged to be delivered to the Griffins’ home.  The servants knew their mistresses were taking tea with Marcus Kane, so naturally, any of them answering the door to a delivery boy with an urgent message would direct him immediately across the street to Number Thirteen.  The telegram – crafted with care, in the event it was somehow intercepted or the conversation overheard by the revenant’s superhuman ears – declared Abby’s aunt in Vienna suddenly and deathly ill, and urgently summoned both Griffins to her bedside with all due haste, informing them that a train was departing from London that night and their fares had been booked. 

Abby did not want her daughter out of Marcus and Lexa’s protection for even a minute, leaving her to undertake the next phase of the plot alone.  But it was imperative both that her servants be removed from danger, and that witnesses see the telegram in order to spread the news of their abrupt departure through the village so it would reach the Jahas’ ears . . . not to mention that somewhere in her house was a _neb ankh_ and the sooner it was found, the sooner Raven would be free.  She would pack a trunk for herself and Clarke, to keep up appearances, and dismiss the servants on a paid holiday so she might close up the house during her absence.  A carriage would then arrive to fetch her, take her on a short and misleadingly circular drive, and deposit her again secretly at the back door to Number Thirteen, where she could enter unobserved.  Indra was instructed to keep the curtains drawn in the house at all times; secrecy was vital, Lexa insisted, to prevent either Thelonious or Rebecca from ever realizing the Griffins had not gone to the Continent but were watching from across the street.

The plan was risky, but it was the only one they had.  And once accomplished, they would be safely contained within the walls of their protected house in order to formulate their battle plan and begin the hunt for Rebecca in earnest.

Lexa took her meals on a tray in Raven’s room to avoid leaving the patient alone, so supper for the remaining three was a sober, silent affair, punctuated by stilted conversation and the occasional miserable whimper or screech from upstairs.  Every time Raven cried out, Clarke’s eyes lifted up reflexively towards the ceiling, brow furrowed in profound worry, and it was difficult to get her to carry on any kind of conversation with the others – not that Marcus or Abby were any more inclined to be chatty.

“What will we do,” Clarke murmured in a forlorn voice, “if we can’t – if Lexa can’t – “

Marcus reached across the table to cover her hand in his own.  “We will,” he said firmly, not a shadow of doubt in his voice.  “We will, Clarke.  Raven will be all right.  Dr. Van Helsing knows what she’s doing.  Don’t forget, her mentor before her and his father before him have been hunting Rebecca for nearly a century.  They knew everything that could be known about her, and now so does Lexa.  This is the closest she has ever come to catching her once and for all.  And remember, neither Rebecca nor Thelonious know she’s here.   They have no idea that we know.”

Abby looked up from her roast lamb to watch him across the table.  He was unaware of her eyes on him and continued speaking to Clarke in a warm, reassuring voice, as though she was the only person in the room.  Clarke had been so young when her father died, Abby found herself reflecting unexpectedly, and there had been no other men in their lives to fill Jacob’s place.  Clarke remembered Marcus Kane, of course; she’d been around ten when he left England, and he’d been very nearly family all her young life as her father’s closest friend.  But that had been half her young lifetime ago, and it was a very different Clarke who sat beside him now.  Not a little girl, but a determined young woman, staring supernatural horrors in the face with a resolve that took her mother’s breath away.  She would have given anything to protect Clarke from this; but now that they were here, she was grateful she could draw strength from Clarke’s own.

Marcus took the girl’s hand in his own, pressing it with comforting firmness, and Clarke smiled for the first time in days, and in that moment Abby felt her heart crack suddenly and violently open inside her chest.

 _Oh,_ a voice whispered in the quiet depths of her mind.   _Oh.  I love him._

_Oh no._

Marcus Kane had been in her life since they were children, a constant steadying presence that kept her grounded and at ease.   And though she never ceased to miss him all the years he was gone, it was not until this moment – watching him give her daughter the kind of warm, sensible comfort he had spent so many years giving her when she most needed it – that she realized the extent of the astonishing thing that had happened to her in the days since his return.

 _Not now,_ she thought to herself, watching him release Clarke’s hand and return to his dinner.   _But maybe, someday . . . when this is all over . . ._

“Mother?” Clarke said, her voice perplexed, and Abby realized she had been calling to her.  “Mother, are you all right?”

“Fine, darling,” she said, forcibly snapping herself out of it.  “I’m fine.”

Marcus looked at her across the table, a question in his eyes, but when he saw her look abruptly away from him, he pressed no further, and they completed their dinner in silence.

* * *

Raven wore herself out with hysterics shortly after they finished dining, and fell into a deep, heavy slumber, which freed Lexa – after securing the girl’s bindings and all the windows – to leave her side and join the others downstairs for a brief respite.  She found Clarke and Marcus pacing the floor of the parlor like restless, caged animals, waiting with ever-increasing anxiety for Abby’s return.

“We need something to drink,” Lexa pronounced.  When the other two did not respond, she sighed and made her way to the sideboard to pour three glasses of brandy and hand them round.  Marcus took his without even looking at her, unable to tear his eyes away from the thin slice of window barely visible between the heavy drapes, through which he could just see the front door of Number Ten across the street.  Clarke took the glass offered her with rather better grace, and at least seemed to see her, which Marcus had not.

“Thank you,” said Clarke, rather absently, taking an obedient sip before resuming her restless pacing.

“It was the only way, Marcus,” said Lexa, moving over to join him at the window.

“I know.”

“Clarke is young, and it could be fatal for her to leave our protection while the fiend is still at large.  And you or I could not have gained entry to the house.  Nor would we have recognized an object that did not belong there.  It could only have been Mrs. Griffin.”

“I know that, Lexa.”

“She is brave,” the girl remarked in a soft voice too low for Clarke to hear, no longer gazing at the narrow glimpse of dark rainy street in front of her, but up at the set jaw and furrowed brow of the man at her side.  “I can readily understand why you feel about her the way you do.”

“I don’t know what you mean,” he said stiffly, not looking at her.  “Mrs. Griffin is my friend.  That is all.”

“I, too, am your friend,” she pointed out.  “You might give me a little credit for knowing you well enough to read even the thoughts you choose not to speak aloud.  Or did you think it was only her daughter who has observed the signs?”

He tensed up at that, sharply and suddenly, as if she had slapped him.  Lexa was perplexed to see the anguish on his face; somehow, it appeared this knowledge pained him.

“Her father was a good man,” he murmured, in a hoarse whisper.  “She loved him.  We all loved him.”  He swallowed hard, turning back to the window.  “What Clarke must think of me,” he murmured.  “That I would sweep back into her life after all this time as though . . . as though I could ever replace – “

He trailed off, unable to complete the thought, and turned back to the window.  Lexa sighed, watching with him in silence for a long moment before she finally spoke.

“Men are such fools,” was all she said.

It was such a wildly unexpected remark, there in the midst of their solemn, frightful vigil, that it startled him into finally turning to look at her.

“Clarke is not a child,” she informed him.  “She is an adult woman.  She wants her mother to be happy.  Yet you believe, somehow, she is incapable of cherishing the memories of her dead father while also making room in her life for you at the same time.  You believe you are in some kind of a contest with Jacob Griffin, which you will certainly lose because he has the advantage of being dead.  So in your mind, he will be enshrined forever as the best man any of you ever knew, a man to whose place in his family you are not fit to aspire, and you are wracked by guilt for even contemplating it.  You love them, but you believe that love is not enough.”  She shook her head, regarding him with fond exasperation as he stared down at her in something like astonishment.  “Why do men seek to make everything into a battle?” she asked him.  “Marcus, why can you not see the truth when it is written plainly in front of your face?  You have not betrayed Jacob Griffin.  And neither has Abby.  She loved someone, and lost him.”  A dark cloud flitted rather unexpectedly across the girl’s angular features, as though discomposed by some thought she was unwilling to speak aloud.  “It ought to break you,” she murmured, and now it was her turn to stare distractedly out the window while Marcus regarded her curiously.  “The death of someone you love.  It ought to shatter you.  But it doesn’t.  There are other things to live for, and so you go on.  Because you must.  You wake up each morning, and you go on.  And then one day you find it has begun to feel possible that you might live again.  You discover that the heart you locked away in a safe, secret dark place might one day wish to see the light of day once more.”  She smiled a faint, sad distant smile out the window, but even though she was looking at Chancellor Lane, she did not see it, her mind’s eye clearly focused somewhere else entirely.  “You brought her back to life, I think,” she murmured without looking at him.  “If she is like me.  If it felt the same for her, after Jacob.  It would feel like coming back to life.”

Marcus said nothing for a long, long time, too overwhelmed with conflicting sensations to sort out what he wanted to say to her.  When he finally spoke, it was to ask a question whose answer he believed he already knew.

“You wear a pendant beneath your gown in the shape of a letter C,” he said.  “And when I met you all those years ago, there was an urgency, a frenzy to your search for the revenant that felt as though this battle between she and you was personal.  I thought, perhaps, it was to do with your mentor Titus, whose death I know was a great blow.  But then I realized I had never asked myself how you came to Titus in the first place.  I had never asked myself what drew such an educated, intelligent creature – an expert in the field of medicine, with what might have become an illustrious and celebrated career as Britain’s leading woman surgeon – to abandon all that and throw in your lot with an eccentric scholar of the occult and devote your life to hunting a creature most of us would never believe existed.”  Lexa did not answer.  “What was her name?” Kane asked gently, and the girl froze.

“Costia,” she finally said, her voice rough and low, as though relearning how to speak aloud a word she had not said in years.

“She was taken by the revenant.  By Rebecca.” 

“In Romania, they do things differently,” she said in a distant voice, staring out into the rainy English night but seeing a very different landscape altogether.  “Titus and I fought the revenant with science.  Knowledge.  We conducted extensive research.  We documented the phenomena of the _neb ankh_ and traced historical and folkloric references back to their earliest source to compile as much information as possible about the precise methods by which power was transferred between the revenant and each object.  We were patient.  We were _scholars._   In Romania,” she added flatly, “they do not wait for you to arrive at a scientific solution.  In Romania, when a young girl begins to display symptoms of revenant possession, the cure is swift and permanent.”

“She was killed?”

“She was beheaded.  The neck of her corpse was stuffed with garlic blossoms, burned and buried in the churchyard.  The head was placed on a spike at the village gates, as a warning.”  She swallowed hard.  “It was intended to frighten away the revenant, upon whom I doubt it had any effect.  It was not Rebecca who was forced to walk past it every morning.”  Marcus was too horrified to speak, but reached out to stroke the girl’s hair.  She shifted almost imperceptibly closer to him, and though she did not visibly react to his touch, she also did not pull away.  “I could not save Costia,” she whispered.  “And there were other victims, in villages all over Europe, of whom we learned too late.  I could not save them either.  But she is _here_ , Marcus,” she breathed, a strange fire glowing in her eyes.  “She is so near to me I can sense her.  I can see her moving behind the curtains inside that house.  I am closer to that fiend than I have ever been – closer than Titus or his father ever got – and I can feel our fates converging, hers and mine.  Blood must have blood,” she whispered in a curious, fervent voice, pulsing with something like fanaticism.  “She will pay for every mind she violated and every life she took.”  He followed the direction of her gaze to the crumbling stone house across the street.  “We have already lost one more girl I could not save,” she murmured.  “So help me God, Marcus, there will be no more.”

Neither of them spoke for a long time. 

“I hear horses,” said Clarke suddenly, breaking into their silence a few moments later, and she drifted over to the window to join them as they surreptitiously watched their plan unfold.  They watched the servants emerge from the house, suitcases and boxes in hand, coats pulled on over their clothes, with confused expressions, as first one carriage and then the other turned down Chancellor Lane.  The first, and slightly grander, was for Abby, who finally, to their great relief, emerged from the front door, followed by Jackson and Miller hauling her steamer trunk.  She looked pale, and rather worried, but otherwise altogether well.   The coachman hauled up the trunk and opened the door, then stood by to wait as Abby hugged and kissed all the servants one by one before finally waving goodbye and climbing inside. 

Her staff watched as the two carriages passed each other, Abby’s departing Chancellor Lane as the other entered, pulling to a halt in front of Number Ten.  This one was larger, more plain in design, and would take all Abby’s household staff to the train station to get them out of town.  She had promised them a seaside holiday, but – because she detested the thought of lying to them, particularly to young Miller with whose own father she was conspiring – she had obtained Lexa’s permission to tell them a partial version of the truth: that with a kidnapper of some kind at large in the village, after Fox’ death, she was too worried for their safety to permit them to remain alone in the house without her.  The faces of the young servants gathered in the street outside, as they climbed one by one into the coach, were puzzled and afraid; but they trusted Abby, so they obeyed without question.

In a few moments it was all over, and Number Ten, Chancellor Lane stood empty.

Marcus Kane could not help reflecting on the eerie prescience of his false vision all those years ago when he received the house-agent’s letter.  When he had pictured the house deserted and abandoned, it had looked very much like this.  Windows dark, all light extinguished. The same air of desolation, the same bleak and dismal weather.  It was as though, in his mind, only the presence of Abby Griffin within its walls gave the house any life again.

Then, “She’s here,” Clarke exclaimed as they heard the sound of a door opening and a murmur of low voices on the other side of the house, and then there she was. 

“Mrs. Griffin has arrived safely, sir,” Indra announced, and the whole room let out a collective sigh of relief.

Who knew what tomorrow would bring, but the first phase of the plan, at least, was complete.

* * *

Indra and Miller divested Abby of her wet hat and coat and carried her trunk upstairs as Lexa poured her a brandy to soothe her rattled nerves.  She had had no luck searching for the _neb ankh,_ unfortunately, but felt better about her chances of success in broad daylight, and without a horde of worried servants trotting along at her heels peppering her with questions, giving her scarcely a moment alone.  But still, the house was empty and the deed was done, and the hard part – the part Abby had been forced to do alone – was now over.

The entire party adjourned to bed shortly after this, in preparation for the long day’s work ahead of them.  Marcus had arranged for a telegram to arrive at the Jahas’ door shortly after dawn which purported to be from Thelonious’ bank and would necessitate an all-day trip to Kingsbridge to address “some irregularities in your accounts.”  By the time he arrived at the bank, cleared up the misunderstanding, made his way back on the train to Hope Cove, and hired a carriage back to Arcadia, it would be dark and their work would hopefully be completed.  He might even return as the old Thelonious, after the _neb ankh_ she had used to enslave him was destroyed.  At any rate, Thelonious was a secondary concern; they were more than equal to a confrontation with him if Rebecca had been successfully defeated.

Which meant they must locate all thirteen items . . . and they only had one day.

Sleep was restless for all of them.  Sheets rustled and bare feet paced in every room of Number Thirteen, accompanied now and then by the low keening whimpers coming from behind the locked door where Raven lay writhing and sweating, tied to her bed, as Lexa bathed her feverish forehead with herbs and water.  It was midnight by the time some semblance of silence fell over the house.  Marcus, cramped on a too-short sofa in the library, was just beginning to feel his bone-deep weariness win out over his relentless discomfort and fading slowly into slumber when he was jolted awake by the creaking of soft footsteps padding down the carpeted stairs.

He sat bolt upright on the sofa, heart pounding, eyes straining into the darkness of the hallway beyond the open library door, watching in terror as a ghostly white shape made its way towards him.  His first thought was that it was Raven, sent to him somehow by Rebecca to do some kind of mischief, and he closed his left fist hard against the silver rosary wound three times around his right wrist as though he might somehow double its protection.  But as the white shape moved into the doorway of the library, he realized, with an entirely different kind of start, that it was Abby.

A small shaft of moonlight sliced in through a gap in the library curtains, and as Abby passed through it she seemed lit from within, the white cotton of her nightdress billowing around her like a cloud, the silhouette of her body just visible enough beneath it to make his heart begin to pound in his chest.  Her soft brown hair hung in a loose, soft braid over one shoulder, resting against bare creamy skin where the neckline of the lacy white concoction was slipping down to one side.

He had never seen anything more alluring in all his life.  He tried to speak and failed, words crumbling into dust in his throat.

“I frightened you,” she murmured, seeing the expression of panic her sudden appearance had brought into his eyes, and interpreting it only partially correctly.  “I’m so sorry.  I didn’t mean to.”

“Are you all right?” he whispered.  “Clarke, the others, are they all right?”

“Everyone’s all right.  I couldn’t sleep.”

“I don’t blame you.”

“May I come in?”

He swallowed hard, unsure how to answer her.  “I confess I don’t entirely know whether or not that is a good idea,” he said in a low voice.

She stepped inside anyway, ignoring him, and closed the library door noiselessly behind her, and he watched in confusion as she glided towards him in her diaphanous white nightgown, sinking to her knees on the carpet beside the sofa where he lay.  “I don’t feel safe anymore when I’m alone,” she murmured.  “I only feel safe when I’m with you.”

He reached down and took her hands in his – trying not to stare at the place where the foamy white lace of her nightdress was slipping off her shoulder, or at the soft curves of her naked body that were plainly visible to him everywhere the fabric settled against her skin.  “I’ll always keep you safe,” he whispered.  “I promise you that.”

“I trust you,” she said.  “I always have.  It’s only that . . . “  But she stopped herself suddenly, looking away, as if unsure how to go on.

“What?”

“She’s your friend,” Abby began hesitantly.  “Lexa is, I mean.  I can see how fond you are of her, and I don’t wish to give offense.  I simply . . . well, I suppose I have questions.”

“That seems perfectly natural, under the circumstances.  I take no offense to that at all.”

“It’s only that she’s so _young.”_

“Well, yes. She is.”

“I don’t like it.  All these children in danger.  We ought to be protecting _them,_ you and I, and instead here we are, relying on them to stand between us and this . . . this creature that none of us fully understand.  Even Lexa, as clever as she is, only knows what she knows from her mentor’s books.  It’s all _theoretical._   Academic.  We’re putting such a great deal of trust in her hands.  I want to have faith in her, but sometimes I’m still frightened.”

He stroked the back of her hands with his thumbs, gentle, soothing.  “I know.  I understand.  But Abby, she knows more than you think she does.  She loved a girl named Costia, and the revenant took her.  When Costia’s village found out, the girl was killed – brutally – to keep the revenant’s influence from spreading.”

“Costia,” murmured Abby, startled, as though the pieces of a puzzle were fitting together in her mind, and she tilted her head quizzically, lost in thought.  He stared at her for a long moment before she noticed and came back to herself with an apologetic laugh.  “The necklace,” she explained.  “The letter C.  I found myself unable to account for it.  But this explains everything.  So has she met Rebecca, face to face?  I mean would Rebecca recognize her?”

“It does not seem so, no.  I believe we are safe from that.  But she has seen the creature’s influence up close, and the terrible destruction she leaves in her wake.  No one could be a more powerful ally, I promise you that.  This battle is personal for her.”

“I believe you,” she murmured.  “I only wish I knew more.  You cannot conceive how helpless I felt, in my own home, hunting for this foreign object – for some item which I ought to be able to recognize as something that did not belong there – but with no notion what I was looking for.  She is quite protective of that book, which I quite understand, and I’m certain I would have no way to comprehend half of what was in it, but I wish I had asked her to show me what Titus knew about the talismans.  I feel at such a loss.”

“We’ll find them,” he assured her.  “All of us.  Together.”

“But then what?” she pressed.  “We still have no idea how she plans to destroy them.  She has remained peculiarly silent on that point, have you noticed?”

“Caution,” Marcus reminded her.  “Remember, everything Raven knows, Rebecca knows.  If Lexa told us everything, or showed us the pages of that book, and one of us let even an accidental word slip within the girl’s earshot – “

“I know.”

“She has good reasons for protecting us all the way she does, by being judicious with what information she chooses to share.  Remember, she lost the girl she loved because she was unable to save her from Rebecca.  If she errs on the side of abundant discretion now, I can easily forgive it.  The more we know, the greater the risk.  But I’m sure tomorrow morning, before we search the house, she will have more information to share with us about what precisely we’re looking for.”  Abby did not appear comforted by this, brow furrowed in concern, so Marcus pressed her hands tightly in his.  “I know you are afraid,” he murmured.  “We are all afraid.  But you have been so brave, Abby.  You are so strong.  Please, don’t lose hope now.  Do not let your strength falter.  Because if yours weakens, so does mine.”  She looked up at him, dark eyes shining, and he felt suddenly reckless, bold, as though the careful restraint he had built up to prevent him from saying all the things he ought never to say had faded.  Perhaps it was Lexa’s influence, the words she had spoken to him before, that reproached him into a sudden desire to waste no more time. Perhaps it was the way the white fabric slipped off her shoulder or the memory of her hands tangling in his hair in the moment before he had almost kissed her.  Perhaps it was all these, and a thousand more things, that finally opened the floodgates and allowed him to tell her the truth.  “My strength comes from you,” he whispered.  “My hope comes from you.  If I am a man alone, lost on a dark and unfamiliar road, you are the light in the window calling me home.  Your courage gives me courage.  Your heart is the only thing in all the world I have ever truly believed in.”

“Marcus,” she whispered, dumbstruck.

“I am in love with you,” he told her, letting go of her hands and sinking down to the carpet beside her to cradle her face and press his lips against her silky brown hair.  “I have loved you for so long that I have forgotten who I was before that.  If there ever was a before.  Perhaps it has been there all my life, and I did not know it until it was too late.  But it never faded or faltered, no matter how far I tried to sail away from you, no matter how many years I put between us.   I tried to tell myself that you were not mine for the having, that you were another man’s wife, and in truth, I only returned to England because I had thought . . . I had been led to believe . . . that you were gone.  I believed I could put you behind me.  But the moment I saw you, I knew it would never be possible.  I knew I loved you still and there was nowhere I could run to escape it.”  He kissed her hair again and again.  “I ask nothing from you,” he whispered.  “You loved Jacob Griffin, you bore and raised a child with him, and he died.  I would never presume . . . I know what a good man he was, I know that I could never – Only let me do this for you, Abby, let me keep you safe, let me keep your daughter safe.  Let me stand by your side until the danger has passed.  And then, if you wish me gone again, I will not refuse you.”

He stopped, too overcome to immediately proceed further, and closed his eyes to rest his head against her own.  His heart pounded heavily in his chest, and he felt dizzy with the terrified exhilaration of speaking such wildly, recklessly dangerous words.

And then it happened.

“Kiss me,” she said quietly, so quiet he very nearly did not hear, and he pulled back to stare at her in wide-eyed astonishment.  “Kiss me,” she said again, her voice steady.  She was very composed and very sure.  She did not look afraid.  She looked as though she knew exactly what she wanted.  “Kiss me,” she said again.

“Abby,” he stammered, frozen in place, “I . . . you . . . “

“Very well.  Then I shall kiss _you._  But one of us must, and as quickly as possible, for if I have to wait another moment I shall go mad.”

“Abby,” he started to say again, but was utterly silenced by the shock of her mouth, hot and wild and hungry against his own.

It was not supposed to be like this.

He was a gentleman, and she was a lady.  It ought to have been bows and curtseys, “Mr. Kane” and “Mrs. Griffin,” with the occasional chaste press of his lips against the back of her hand, until perhaps one day he might begin inching towards inquiring whether she had ever given any thought to marrying again.  Then, and only then, at some date miles in the future, might he permit himself finally to bend his head and press his lips softly against her own before taking her hand and leading her to the bed that would be theirs from now on.  Yes, damn it all, he had thought about this, had imagined it, but always with perfect propriety.  Always holding himself in check, decorous and respectful, taking care to do right by her social position, by her daughter, by the roles they played in the village, by the rules of how men and women ought to behave.

He had never imagined it like this, Abby wearing nothing but a gossamer cloud of white muslin, wildly tugging at his shoulders and hair to sink down onto the soft carpeting and pull his body down over her own.  She was warm and soft beneath him, every curve and angle physically palpable to him.  He could feel the peaks of her nipples, the warmth between her thighs.  He could smell sweat and desire as he nosed into the hollow between throat and collarbone, sweeping rough kisses along the bare expanse of white skin. 

“I knew it would feel like heaven,” she whispered, “for you to hold me like this.  I knew I should never want it to end.”

“God help me, Abby, this is madness.”

“I don’t care,” she gasped as he kissed her throat.  “Do you?”

“I ought to, but I don’t.”

“Then don’t stop,” she whispered, and tugged up the hem of his muslin nightshirt to the waist, laying him bare before her.  It was so easy, like this.  No buttons or fastenings, no cumbersome gloves, no corsets or waistcoats or layers of silk.  Just a few moments of fumbling, to pull loose fistfuls of billowing fabric out of the way, and then suddenly, shockingly, there they were.

When he entered her, they both gasped sharply and suddenly in unison, long ragged intakes of breath.  _“Oh,”_ she murmured as he pressed gently down, and he paused for a moment to make sure she was all right. 

“Abby, if you . . . if this is . . . “

“Don’t stop,” she panted, curling a slender thigh around his body to pull him in closer and closer.  So he let go, let his hips rise and fall, let his weight sink down on hers, let the pulsing liquid softness draw him in.  “Don’t stop,” she whimpered as he moved above her, clutching wildly at his hands, his arms, his hair.  “Marcus, please.  Oh please.  Don’t stop.”

“Are you . . . do you feel . . . “

“Yes,” she murmured into his throat.  “I’m close.  Oh, my love, I’m so close.  Please.  _Please_.”

“So am I,” he whispered, and she smiled up at him, hands tangling in his hair.

“Stay inside me, then,” she breathed into his throat, pressing soft, frantic little kisses against his sun-browned skin.  “Finish inside me.”

“Abby . . .”

“I want you to,” she whispered.  “I want to feel it.  Let me feel it.”  And she rolled over in one abrupt motion, surprising him with the strength of her small soft body, until he was flat on his back as she straddled his powerful, muscled hips.  Her fingertips grazed up and down the soft skin of his forearms and wrists, sending tiny shivers through his body.  He had not known his wrists were so sensitive to touch, but it took no more than the light caress of her fingertips against that pulse point for his entire body to quake beneath her.  He groaned her name over and over, frantic, incoherent, as she moved against him, beckoning him towards the edge of the abyss before finally, with a desperate animal sound, he tumbled over into oblivion and felt himself falling and rising at once, his body crackling and incandescent as though lightning pulsed through his bloodstream. 

“Abby,” he panted, chest heaving as he fought to catch his breath, the hurricane inside him finally subsiding.  Her body softened and melted against his as she leaned down, pillowing her head on his chest, fingertips still tracing absentminded circles over the delicate, impossibly sensitive skin of his wrists.

_His wrists._

He sat bolt upright, forcing her to halfway tumble off him onto the carpet, her face baffled and hurt.  But he was not looking at her face.  He was looking, with a sudden, horrible sensation of sick panic, at the little heap of silver beads where his mother’s rosary lay on the carpet.  An ugly wave of nausea rose up inside his chest as his conscious mind finally realized the thing he had refused to let himself realize from the very first moment he pressed his mouth against her bare white throat.

“Abby,” he breathed, fighting down panic.  _“Where is Jacob’s ring?”_

She froze in place, stunned into silence, and he watched her hand fly to her neck, desperately scrabbling around in a futile attempt to find a thing that was not there, before looking down at her hand and seeing it bare as well.

“No,” she whispered, horror dawning on her face.  “No, no, no, no, no . . .”

“You took the rings off,” he said, voice low, fear and fury mixed with grief.  “You took the rings off and then you came in to take the rosary off of me.”

“I wouldn’t,” she protested, “I didn’t – “  But it was too late.

“Was any of it real?” he asked her in a voice so achingly hollow and sad that Abby felt tears begin to course down her cheeks.

“Marcus,” she choked out desperately, but the word was stifled by repressed sobs.  He reached across the carpet to where the rosary lay, which drew him closer to her.  She recoiled – instinctively, almost violently – as he drew back his arm with the silver beads in his hand, and he realized the silver crucifix had brushed against her knee.

The realization of what had happened, and what it meant, hit them both at the same time.

“It’s too late,” he said in a hollow voice.  “It’s already too late.  She isn’t just in your mind, Abby, she’s in your blood too.”

“Get Lexa,” she whispered hoarsely.  “For God’s sake, Marcus, _get Lexa.”_

This was not what he had expected her to say.  He had expected pleading, cajoling, manipulation, the insistence that this was not what it appeared to be.  He did not expect this, the way she retreated from him as fast as she could, trembling in a tiny ball with her back pressed up against the sofa. 

“Get Lexa,” she demanded again, her voice harsh with panic.  “Before something dreadful happens.  Before Rebecca gets in.  Before I hurt someone.  Lexa will know what to do.”

“Lexa!” he bellowed as loudly as he could, and the response was instantaneous, as though the girl had hardly been asleep at all.  Within minutes the whole house was awake, lamps switching on and footsteps everywhere, as the young doctor flew down the stairs and into the library.

Her keenly observant eye took in the entire scene – nightshirts rumpled, sofa cushions knocked askew – and she prompted Marcus with nothing more than a few discreet head nods and raised eyebrows to conceal at least a part of the evidence before Clarke and the servants came racing in after her. 

“Mother!” Clarke exclaimed, moving towards the corner where Abby had retreated into herself, but Lexa held out a hand to stop her.

“No, Clarke,” she said.  “I’m sorry but you mustn’t.  We need to get your mother upstairs, to Raven’s room.  It is no longer safe for her anyplace else in the house.  Indra, Miller, we will need a second bed brought into that room.  One with posters on it, like the other.  And rope.”  She looked down at Abby.  “I’m very sorry about this, Abby,” she said, and appeared to mean it.  But Abby shook her head.

“Do it,” she rasped, “do whatever you must.  Don’t let me hurt them.”

“I won’t,” said the doctor, kneeling before her. “I won’t.”

“What happened to her?” asked Clarke, a quiver of panic in her voice.  Kane put a hand on her shoulder to steady her, pulling her back a little from getting too close.

“I’m sorry,” whispered Abby, staring up at her daughter through a tangled curtain of hair, her braid coming loose around her shoulders.  “I’m sorry, Clarke, I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry . . .”

“It must have happened when she went back to the house,” said Marcus to Lexa, attempting to make his voice calm for Clarke’s sake.   “Her rings are gone.”

“Rebecca has another one of the servants, then,” said Lexa.  “Someone who found a way to convince Abby – the real Abby – to take off her rings.”

“But how is that possible?” Clarke demanded.  “She knew!  She knew the rings were her only protection.  Who on earth – “

“The clasp,” Abby whispered suddenly, in a rough and fractured voice, as though the words hurt her.  “The clasp . . . he said it was broken . . .” 

“Who said?” asked Clarke.  “Mother, what are you talking about?”  But Abby could say no more, tears streaming down her face.  Lexa knelt down in front of her as the others stared and took Abby by the shoulders.

“Abby,” she said firmly.  “I need you to listen to me.  I need you to _fight._   Rebecca does not want you to tell us what you know.  She will make it painful.  She will make it difficult.  But you are strong.  And we have faith in you.  Now I need you to remember what happened when you went into the house.”

Abby looked up at her suddenly, all trace of fear gone from her eyes, and tilted her head to the side to regard them all with a blank, quizzical expression.

An expression both Marcus and Clarke, with a sick, gnawing pain in their stomachs, recognized instantly.

“There is no pain in the City of Light,” said Abby in a cool, dreamy voice that was most emphatically not her own.  “I have studied human behaviors and interactions.  The avoidance of pain is the driving force in much of human behavior.  If she attempts to answer any of your questions, she will experience severe physical pain.  Surely this is not the outcome you desire.”

“Hello, Rebecca,” said Lexa calmly. 

Clarke shrank back in confusion and fright, burying her head in Marcus’ chest.  He folded his arms around her, stroking her hair, and kissed the top of her head. “It’s going to be all right,” he murmured.  “I promise.”

“I remember your Costia,” said Abby in that same chilly, numb voice, and Lexa tensed up slightly at this.  “Her death was unfortunate.  I was not finished with her yet.  But your choice to blame me for your loss is incorrect.  I wished only to make her immortal like myself.  She died at the hands of human men.  Your anger is misplaced.”

“I disagree,” said Lexa softly, something dangerous in her voice, and Abby tilted her head again, regarding her thoughtfully.

“You have never understood me,” she observed.  “You and your kind have been a very great inconvenience over many years.  I require a mortal companion for my work, and it grows more difficult for me to find one.  I am forced to move from city to city to avoid suspicion.  It is yourself, Dr. Van Helsing, whose work continues to make my survival so difficult.”

“I am no longer interested in conversing with you, Rebecca,” said Lexa coldly, pulling the silver pendant from beneath her collar.  “Bring Abby back.”

Abby’s eyes flicked from the silver C to Lexa’s icy glare and back again.  “This will cause her pain,” she observed. 

“She is strong.”

“But she is not immortal.”

“Leave, or I will make you leave,” said Lexa, leaning in and holding the necklace close to Abby, who began to hiss and scratch and struggle to wriggle away.  “Hold her, Marcus,” Lexa ordered, and so he let go of Clarke and sank down onto his knees beside Abby, gripping her arms with both of his, holding her forcibly in place.  Lexa lifted the pendant and pressed it against Abby’s forehead.  The effect was instant, and terrible.  She screamed and wailed and struggled to break free of Marcus’ vise-like grip, but he held her fast, murmuring apologies under his breath as she fought back against Lexa. 

“You’re hurting her!” cried Clarke, but Lexa did not let go.

“I am sorry, Clarke, truly,” she said.  “But this is the only way.”

Then suddenly, with one loud, sharp cry, Abby’s entire body contorted once, twice, then collapsed.  Marcus caught her in his arms as she went boneless and limp, and Lexa pulled the silver pendant away from Abby’s forehead and tucked it once more into her blouse.

“Abby?” she said.  “Abby, can you hear me?”  Abby’s eyes fluttered open and she stared blankly up at Lexa.

“Oh, thank God,” whispered Clarke, and Abby looked up at her.

“Clarke?” she whispered, voice cracked and hoarse.  “No, my darling, don’t come any closer, she may not be in control right now but she hasn’t gone.  She’s still here, she’s still in my mind, she’s still . . .”  Her voice trailed off into broken sobs.  Marcus, who still held her in his arms, gently sat her up against the wall and reached out to smooth the tangled hair back away from her face, but she recoiled almost violently at his touch.

“No, please, no,” she whispered, “stay back.  I’m afraid of hurting you again.  I’m afraid . . .”  Tears streamed down her cheeks.  “How can you ever bear to touch me again?” she whispered, in a voice too low for Clarke to hear, and Marcus felt his heart split in too at the ache of misery in her voice. 

But he obeyed her, his bones heavy with sadness, and moved back to the other side of the room to stand once more with Clarke.

“She is dormant, but not gone,” said Lexa.  “And she still sees and knows everything that Abby knows.  We must be very careful what we say in her presence.  But Abby,” she said, leaning in and gripping the woman by the shoulders, “you know things that can help us.  You have information we can use.  Tell me, how did you come to take off your silver rings?”

“He said the clasp was broken,” she murmured, brow furrowed in concentration.  “I was . . . I was in my bedroom.  I had gone up to pack.  I came into the room, and something in it was wrong . . . something was out of place . . .”

“Do you remember what it was?”

“There was . . . there was . . . “  She furrowed her brow, fighting desperately through Rebecca’s fog to try and remember.  “The blue wash basin,” she finally said, which meant nothing to anyone in the room.

Except for Clarke.

“No, Mother,” she said patiently.  “Your wash basin is pink and yellow.  And mine is lavender.  And the servants and guest rooms all have white ones.  There is no blue wash basin in that house.”

“Was it full of water?” asked Lexa, eyes lighting up as though inspiration had struck. Abby nodded.  Lexa rose to her feet and moved to the other side of the room where Abby could not see her, and pulled the notebook out of her pocket, flipping through until she found the page she sought.  “’Lake,’” she exclaimed triumphantly.  “Look, here, these are runes Titus deciphered with clues to the talismans she carries with her.  One of them is labeled ‘Lake.’”

“The water basin is a _neb ankh_ ,” murmured Clarke in amazement.  “And she realized something was wrong.  She knew it was out of place.”

“And then what happened, Abby?” asked Lexa, shoving the book back in her pocket before returning to her patient.  “Where did your rings go?”

“He said the clasp was broken,” said Abby again.  “I was staring at the basin, trying to understand . . . and I took the ring between my fingers, just to hold it . . . to feel safe . . . and then it came loose in my hand.  I don’t know how.  So then he said, ‘Oh, the clasp is broken, here, let me get you another chain,’ and went to rummage through my jewelry drawer.  And I didn’t like to take it off, but I couldn’t tell him why, and I knew it was only for a moment and then I’d put it right back on, and it couldn’t be . . . it couldn’t be . . . because he’s like my son . . . he would never . . .”

“Who, Abby?” Lexa prodded her.  “Who was it?”

“Jackson,” she whispered.  “It was Jackson.”

“What?” Clarke exclaimed in horror.  “No, Mother, he loves you, he would never do something like that.”

“It wasn’t him, it was Rebecca,” Lexa reminded her.  “All of this was done by Rebecca.  Abby, where are the rings?”

“I don’t know,” she whimpered, “I don’t know.  I took the chain from my neck and I handed it to Jackson and then I felt . . . this wave of cold . . . like I was floating . . . and then she was there, Rebecca was there . . . in front of me and all around me, like a fog . . . and she told me to proceed with our plan as though nothing was wrong, so no one would suspect.  And then she told me to get the silver talismans from everyone else by any means necessary.”

“Clarke,” Lexa said immediately, turning over her shoulder.  “Go.  Check on Raven.  Make sure she’s all right and the necklace is still there.  And stay with her, would you?  I don’t want Rebecca trying her next.”

Reluctantly, Clarke nodded, gave her mother one last look full of desperate affection and heartbreaking love, and made her way back up the stairs.  Once she was gone, Lexa turned back to Abby.

“There is no time here for delicate manners,” she said, “so I am afraid I must be blunt.  Abby, did Rebecca instruct you to seduce Marcus?”

Kane started, head snapping up to stare at Lexa in horror, aghast at hearing the darkest dread of his heart spoken aloud.  Tears sprang to Abby’s eyes. "It wasn't like that," she whispered.  "I wanted to, I wanted to . . . but she told me I could make him tell me anything, she told me to get him to take off the rosary.  She told me to ask him . . .”  She stopped, as if struck by a thought.  “She told me to ask him . . .”  She looked up at Marcus, suddenly for a moment as though she was her old self again.  “What did I ask you?” she demanded.  “Before.  When I first came in.  I was asking you something, but she won’t let me remember.”

“The book,” he said, remembering.  “You wanted to know if I knew what was in the book.  About the runes, and about how to destroy the _neb ankh._   You wanted to know what Lexa knew.”

Lexa looked up at him.  “This is very good,” she said, pleased.  “Rebecca does not know what I know, so we have her on the defensive.  She has not yet been able to ascertain whether I can identify all the neb ankh, or how I plan to destroy them.”

 “She’s afraid,” murmured Abby with something like triumph.  “She knows we can defeat her.”

“Thank you, Abby,” said Lexa.  “You did well.  You must rest now.  Come upstairs with me, and we will put you to bed in Raven’s room.  I will be with you all night, and I promise, even if Rebecca returns, you will be safe.  This will be over soon.”

It was Lexa who helped Abby up the stairs – Marcus still could not quite bear to touch her, a fact she noted with heartbroken resignation – to the room where Indra and Miller were just finishing their work.  They had found a narrow, high-posted child’s bed in the attic, which came apart and back together easily enough to fit down the stairs and through the door.  When Marcus and Lexa entered with Abby, Clarke was sitting beside Raven, stroking her sweaty forehead with a cool towel.

“She was restless for a bit, but now she’s sleeping,” said Clarke.  Lexa nodded. 

“Go back to bed,” she said.  “I will watch over your mother.  I give you my word.”

“May I kiss her goodnight?” asked Clarke, but Lexa shook her head.

“I’m sorry, but no,” she said.  “Your silver talisman will pain her, and she is still unstable.  But with any luck, all of this will be over tomorrow.”

“I love you,” Abby whispered as her daughter moved hesitantly to the door. 

“I love you too,” Clarke whispered back, tears in her eyes, before returning to her own room.

Marcus and Lexa bound a pliant, unresisting Abby hand and foot to the posts of the bed, pulling the rope tight around her wrists.  “Did Abby know your mother?” Lexa asked him abruptly, seemingly out of nowhere.  He stared at her blankly.

“I . . . what?”

“Your mother.  Did she and Abby know each other.”

“Very well,” he said.  “They were good friends.  Abby and Jacob helped care for her before she died.”

Lexa nodded, pleased.  “Good,” she said.  “That will do.”  And she lifted his hand, tugged at the silver rosary around his wrist until the thread snapped, and caught the cascade of silver beads before they tumbled to the floor.

“What on earth are you doing?”

“The rings are still in her house,” said Lexa matter-of-factly.  “The boy in Bournemouth who gave Raven her necklace is no use to Abby, and Rebecca will have made sure that nothing she packed in that trunk has a trace of silver.  Clarke has her father’s pocketwatch, but it cannot be split in two.  A string of rosary beads, however, can.”  She handed him the snapped thread and poured the handful of beads back into his hand.  “String those back together to tie round your wrist,” she said.  “I only need this.”  And she plucked the crucifix out of his hand and made her way back to Abby.

“This will hurt,” she said.  “I am very sorry.”

“Do it,” whimpered Abby.  “Do what you must to keep the others safe.”  So Lexa pulled at the drawstring ribbon around the neckline of Abby’s white nightdress, looped it through the top of the crucifix, and tied it on so it fell just above her heart.  Instantly Abby began to convulse and tremble, breathing hard and fighting to remain calm.

“She is in pain,” Marcus murmured, his heart shattering over and over as he watched the woman he loved strain frantically against her rope bindings so she could rip the silver crucifix off her chest.

“It will be over soon,” said Lexa, resuming her position in the comfortable leather chair in the corner, her vigil beginning anew.

“You don’t know that.”

“The revenant’s influence on the human mind is very specific,” said Lexa almost casually, pulling Titus’ notebook out of her pocket and perusing it without looking at him.  “She is adept at immediately perceiving the victim’s point of greatest vulnerability, and exploiting it.  She takes the thing we cherish most, and she turns us against it . . . and it against us.  Raven, for example,” she went on, “has no family.  She lives with a distant aunt and uncle who do not much care for her, and her parents died when she was very young.  She had no experience of anything that felt like a home until she came to stay with Clarke.  Rebecca understood that immediately.  Hence Raven’s symptoms of excessive anger and cruelty.  Taking away the one home she had would put Raven even more in Rebecca’s power.  Do you understand what I am saying to you?”

Marcus said nothing, just watched as a trembling, miserable Abby, tears streaming down her face, struggled to break free of her restraints, failing over and over again.

“There is a part of you,” said Lexa gently, “that wonders now – would always wonder, perhaps – if all of it was a lie.  Perhaps Rebecca got to Abby before your ship even landed.  Before you even laid eyes on her again.  Perhaps she was manipulating you all along, and the story about Jackson was an entire fabrication.  Perhaps none of it was real.”

His silence was assent enough; she could read the thoughts on his face, and sighed wearily.

“Men are fools,” she said, for the second time that evening.  “For one thing, you have forgotten that I tested her blood and Clarke’s and yours, and all of it was red.  Rebecca could not possibly have reached her before I arrived.  Not to mention that she was wearing both of those rings _already_.  It happened in the house, Marcus.  Tonight.  Exactly as she told us it did _._ ”

“My God,” whispered Marcus, something like shame creeping into his voice.  “I . . . I had forgotten that.  About the blood, and the ring.”

“And for another thing, you idiot,” she went on, ignoring him, “if you were listening to me, you would understand that Rebecca specifically chose to exploit Abby’s love and desire for you _because of how powerful it is.”_

This startled him into turning and looking at her.

“Even a revenant knows not to come anywhere close to a mother’s love for her child,” she explained.  “She knew she could get nowhere near Clarke.  But sexual desire, she understands.  Or, she believes she does.  She perceives it to be simpler.”

“This conversation is mortifying,” he muttered under his breath.

“Good,” said Lexa crisply.  “You deserve it.  Abby saw the way you looked at her, Marcus.  She watched it happen.  She watched you rewrite the entire history of your relationship together and make every true thing false.  As though every sign of love she ever gave you was a trick from Rebecca.  _This is what Rebecca wants._   She takes good things, true things, and poisons them.  She wanted you to wonder, for the rest of your life, how much of what happened down there on the library floor was really Abby and how much was her.  She wanted doubt to creep into your mind, she wanted you to grow so suspicious you could no longer bear Abby’s touch.  She wanted Abby to lose all ability to trust _herself,_ too wracked with guilt to permit you to come anywhere near her even if you wanted to.  She wanted you both to believe it was all a lie.  But Marcus, that isn’t possible.  Don’t you see that?   _Because it’s no use to Rebecca if it isn’t real.”_

He stared at her, his mind a whirlwind.  Everything she said rang true to him.  Everything she said felt right. 

“But then,” he whispered, “but then . . . “

“Rebecca made her ask you about the book, and take the rosary off your wrist,” she said.  “That was all.  Everything else was Abby.  Everything else was real.” 

“Lexa,” he began, but she shook her head.

“Go to bed,” she said gently.  “We have a great deal of work to do tomorrow.  After we’ve destroyed Rebecca, you will have time to make this right.”

Marcus nodded wordlessly, then turned to go, dropping a soft kiss and murmured words of apology on Abby's sweat-soaked hair as he made his way to the door.  Lexa made sure it was securely fastened behind him, locked and latched, then checked all her knots and bindings to make sure both women were secured.  Last of all, she checked the window, drawing back the heavy curtains to check the latch.  A movement on the other side of the pane caught her eye, and she realized what it was.

Rebecca stood in the street outside their house, looking up at Lexa in the window.  Their eyes met.  Rebecca tilted her head to the side with that quizzical look which appeared to mean she was processing new information, and Lexa heard both the women tied to the beds begin to grow restless.

The revenant could not enter on her own, and she could not remain in the street after the sun rose.  But until then, they were trapped.

Lexa leaned back in the chair and closed her eyes, a bone-deep weariness overtaking her, and fell asleep with her hand clutching the silver C around her throat.

* * *

They slept badly, and awoke to disaster. 

The constable had come to Chancellor Lane during the night, said Miller.  Mayor Jaha had been found dead in the middle of the high street - arms and legs splayed out, skull cracked open, as if shoved out of a moving carriage - and his wife had disappeared.


	7. The Blue Bowl

“She took Fox because she did not believe anyone would notice the girl missing,” explained Lexa, sipping her tea as she and Marcus stood together at the parlor window where they gazed out at the gray sky and the wet cobbles and the hearse that had come to carry away what was left of Thelonious Jaha.  Chancellor Lane (and Number Sixteen in particular) had been a flurry of chaos for the past two days, upsetting their careful plans; but now the church bells were tolling for the funeral, and the black coffin - inside which they fervently hoped Rebecca would let him rest - was descending the steps of Number Sixteen on the shoulders of six black-clad pallbearers, and soon the afternoon streets would be empty of everything but the rain.  "Remember, she came from Paris.  She has lived most of her life in crowded cities, where young women often go missing and no one asks any questions.  She was not expecting anyone to come looking for the girl so quickly, if at all."

"Raven's dream," he said thoughtfully.  "It was not really a dream, was it?  It was a vision of the truth.  She held Fox captive in that graveyard, draining her bit by bit every night.  All those days we were searching the village for her - knocking on doors, questioning train porters, dragging the bottom of the lake - and all that time she was hidden away in the last place anyone would have gone to look for a living girl."  He watched the rain pour down on the gray cobblestones in silent, somber contemplation for a long moment, guilt and sadness aching in his warm brown eyes.  "We could have saved her," he murmured.  "If we had searched the graveyard - if we had found her sooner - "

"She would not have been lying on that bench in plain sight, Marcus.  She would be concealed inside a mausoleum, or some other hidden place where Rebecca trusted she would not be detected.  Would you have dug up every tomb, pried open every coffin?"  Lexa shook her head.  "You would never have found her.  And even if you had, it would have been too late.  It was too late from the moment Fox disappeared.  Remember, Rebecca was starving.  She cannot enter a house unless she has been invited, and Abby was the first.  It is difficult for her to feed while traveling.  She might feed on Thelonious a bit at a time, as an emergency measure only, but she needed him at full strength for the role he had to play.  Other than that, she may not have fed at all since leaving Paris.  She would have been rapidly weakening.  I would imagine that she drained enough blood from Fox the very first night that the girl could not have survived.  She might very well have intended to come back the next night and finish the job, but the visit from Abby and the news of such an extensive search no doubt caused her to modify her plans.  She knew she would have to ration herself, draining Fox more slowly, and also adjust her tactics as she hunted for her second victim.  Thelonious very probably assured her that a mere servant girl would not be missed, and she realized very quickly that he was incorrect.  She did not modify her calculations to account for the difficulty of attempting to find prey in such a small town.”

“She did not modify her calculations to account for Abby Griffin,” Marcus said grimly, and Lexa nodded.

“Rebecca never makes the same mistake twice," she said.  "She learned from the error with Fox that she would need to pace herself and be far more cautious.  She had to feed on Raven every night, but only a little at a time, and she could not take her out of the house without arousing additional suspicion.”

“But when we brought Raven here, and she could not reach her – “

“She went back to Number Thirteen to seek more prey from the only potential human victims she had any way to reach - Abby's servants.  Perhaps Jackson was the first of them she stumbled upon alone, or the only one wearing no silver; more likely, she settled upon him as the one Abby was most likely to trust, using him to coax Abby into removing her ring the way she used Abby to get the rosary off you.  And she would have been forced to move quickly; she knew, through Raven, that I was here, she knew I came armed with knowledge about how to defeat her, and she would have wasted no time, the moment the sun set, in securing herself an ally inside that house to shield that _neb ankh_ from discovery.  So he followed her up to the bedroom, to lure her into removing the silver rings before she realized the wash basin was the wrong color and put the pieces together."

"Which she very nearly did."

"Indeed.  Abby's cleverness has been a thorn in Rebecca's side from the beginning, and has forced her more than once to modify her plans with short notice.  She is not accustomed, I think, to being outwitted.  She did not predict that Abby would send the servants away.  With Jackson gone, and all the rest of us sealed inside this house whose walls she could not breach, she was alone on a deserted street with only one human victim . . . and no notion how long it would be before she found the opportunity to feed again.  Thelonious was all she had left."

“What about Abby?”

“I don’t believe she took Abby because she was hungry,” said Lexa thoughtfully.  “I believe that was a tactical maneuver.  She knew we had Raven sequestered, and were carefully keeping her out of our plans.  She needed a spy inside the house.  I do not think – “ She paused, searching for a delicate choice of phrasing.  “I do not think it occurred to Rebecca that it would take so little time for anyone to detect that the ring around her neck had gone.”

“You mean that I should see her without her clothes on.”

“It was rather providential,” said Lexa, staring straight ahead, and though her face did not move from its impassive expression, he could hear the very faint hint of a smile in her voice.  He blushed and changed the subject.

“That reminds me of something else I don’t understand,” he asked her.  “Jackson coaxed her into removing the ring around her neck; but why did the ring on her hand not protect her?”

“Because that ring was always hers,” Lexa explained.  “It never belonged to Jacob.  It has the ordinary protective powers of silver – that is, revenants and other supernatural creatures find its presence painful and unpleasant – but it could not itself block Rebecca’s mind control.  She removed the ring that protected her, and handed it to Jackson; after which point Rebecca was free to do what she pleased.  After that, the ring on her finger became painful to touch, so naturally she simply removed it.”

Clarke approached behind them just then, joining the other two at the window.  “I did not like him a bit,” she said, “even before he met Rebecca.  But still, it isn’t right that he should have died like that.”

“When we find Rebecca,” said Lexa somberly, “all her victims will finally have justice.  Thelonious Jaha included.”

"It seems, at any rate, to support the theory that she fled the village," mused Clarke.  "She would have needed all Jaha's blood if she were preparing herself for a long journey of some kind."

But Lexa shook her head.  "I have a theory," she said.  "A rather grim one, but it strikes me as plausible.  After the incidents of last night, Rebecca - who sees and hears everything that Raven and Abby do - would have known immediately that we know about both Jackson, and the blue wash basin.  It stands to reason that the first thing Rebecca would do, then, would be to force Thelonious to help her gather up all the _neb ankh_ \- including the one in Abby's house - and make a plan to flee the town."

"And then, once she did not need him anymore, she drained him of blood and pushed him out of the carriage before continuing on her way."  Marcus shuddered.  "What a gruesome end."

"No, I don't think so," said Lexa. "I rather wonder, instead, if Thelonious was murdered in the act of attempting to escape _from Rebecca."_ The other two turned away from the window to stare at her, confounded, as she went on.  "Consider it," she told them.  "If they had both been in the carriage, if they had packed up all the talismans to flee Arcadia together, Rebecca would never have let him go.  She would have needed someone to assist her in the business of traveling, someone to pack up the _neb ankh_ and haul them from train station to ship.  Someone with a mortal, corporeal form.  And Thelonious Jaha was the closest to hand.  No, it seems highly unlikely that she would throw him out of the carriage to his death and continue on without him.  I wonder if she sent him to retrieve the _neb ankh_ from Abby's house and he saw her silver rings lying somewhere in the bedroom.  He would have realized that Rebecca had managed, somehow, to trap Abby, and I strongly suspect that that was never meant to be part of the plan.  Remember who her other three victims were - two servants, and an outsider.  I think Thelonious believed Fox, and Jackson, and perhaps even Raven, to be expendable.  People no one would miss.  But whether for practical reasons - because Abby Griffin is such a public person - or more personal ones, if he felt any kind of friendship or fellow-feeling for her at all - this may have been, finally, at long last, the bridge he could not cross.  I wonder if a piece of the human Jaha who remained conscious and present inside the mind of which she had taken nearly full possession finally balked, refused to cooperate, and attempted to flee the town and leave her behind.  At which point she caught up with him and exacted her revenge for his betrayal."

"Good God," breathed Marcus, as they watched the undertaker close the doors on Jaha's coffin and mount the front of his funeral-carriage to drive off.  "I never thought I should say this, but poor Thelonious."

"If your theory is true," said Clarke, "that's rather wonderful news for us.  With Jaha dead, she has no one to carry the _neb ankh_ for her.  So all thirteen of them might very well still be in the house."

"Yes," said Lexa.  "But _so might she."_

Clarke shivered at this, and fell silent.  The three of them watched as the black horses pulling the funeral carriage, followed by a modest contingent of mourners (he had, after all, been the former mayor, and there were social conventions to be observed), made their slow, sober way down Chancellor Lane.

A morbid hush fell over Number Thirteen as the procession passed the house.  Even the two women tied to their beds in the upstairs room seemed to fall silent, waiting with bated breath for the mayor’s dead body to go by as it made its final journey to the ground.  Marcus, whose mother’s Catholicism came back to him at odd moments, made the Sign of the Cross.  He could not feel anything like affection for the man who had brought such a horrific evil upon their village, but he had known Thelonious since boyhood and it felt wrong not to observe the moment in some way.  And if Lexa's theory was right, he could yet be the final piece of the puzzle that saved them all.

They watched in silence until first the horses, then the carriage, then the black-clad followers turned at the end of the lane and disappeared from sight.

Chancellor Lane was deserted.

“All right,” said Lexa grimly.  “It’s time.”

* * *

 The mayor’s death had upset their plans quite considerably.  On the one hand, of course, they were now safe from any danger he might pose – either on his own merits, or in his ability to warn Rebecca of what was coming.  And that was no small blessing.  But the Griffins were believed by all the village to be in Europe, which meant they could not leave Number Thirteen while any of the many visitors, mourners, undertaker’s assistants or police who had spent the past two days crawling all over the house across the street remained there.  Lexa had counted on an entire day – sunrise to sunset – to search the house immediately; instead, they had lost two days since Rebecca first learned of Lexa’s presence, and only had a few hours of daylight left.  They would be forced to act quickly, with just over two hours before the sun would begin to set at six o’clock, since the possibility that Rebecca remained in the house - somehow concealed and waiting for them - could not be discounted.

This had caused a rather risky modification to Lexa’s plan, regarding which Clarke and Marcus had found themselves in vehement disagreement, though in the end they had finally reached a hesitant consensus that it was their only choice:

Namely, to break first into Number Ten, find and destroy the neb ankh inside it and retrieve Abby’s wedding rings – which, if successful, would free Raven and Abby from Rebecca’s influence in time to help the other three scour the Jahas’ house for the other twelve.

Clarke had been in favor from the beginning.  She wanted her mother and her friend brought back to themselves as quickly as possible – not to mention Jackson, who was so much more vulnerable to Rebecca without them, and who could do great unknowing harm to the others, who trusted him implicitly. And Lexa’s belief that Raven and Abby’s mental link with Rebecca would expedite the search process considerably was persuasive.  But Marcus was more difficult to convince.  He was all in favor of going after the wash basin and the rings before anything else happened, but he balked at the idea of subjecting Raven and Abby to entering Rebecca’s house.  Lexa, after all, had only theoretical knowledge about the workings of the _neb ankh;_ she had never seen one in person, attempted to destroy one, or studied the ways they interacted with the revenant’s victims.  They were putting an awful lot of trust in Titus’ notes, it seemed to him, and the thought of Abby coming in contact with a piece of Rebecca’s soul trapped in an innocent-looking object, and what it might do to her, made his blood run cold.

They had spent all the previous day, while the Jahas’ house remained full of people coming and going, seated around the library tea table, surrounded by Lexa’s stacks of books, arguing out both sides.  The room had begun to look as though a tornado had swept through it – papers and teacups everywhere, books lying open on every flat surface.  Lexa could not work anywhere within sight or earshot of Raven and Abby, so Miller and Indra had been fully conscripted to attend to their care, and trivial matters such as clearing away plates of half-eaten sandwiches paled in comparison to making sure Raven did not attempt once more to chew through her restraints.  Abby, having been kissed by Rebecca only once, and wearing the protection of Vera’s silver crucifix, had not advanced as far in her malady as the younger woman had; but she, too, had moments of hysterics and violent fits, and was only very little less in need of constant watching than Raven was.

Marcus had not quite determined how – or even if – he ought to tell Clarke what had transpired between himself and her mother; he could not imagine it would be a comfortable conversation, but it did leave her rather in the dark as to the source of his sudden and overwhelming protectiveness of Abby, or the guilt he appeared to experience every time he looked down at her shaking and sweating in her narrow bed.  To her it appeared only that Uncle Marcus had been struck by a devastating sadness, and she did not entirely understand it.  The fear and worry made sense to her, as they were no less than her own, but the melancholy was unlike him. 

Still and all, Lexa’s notes were very clear about the possibility that a victim freed from the influence of one _neb ankh_ might have a kind of heightened sense awareness towards any of the others, and they could not afford to leave even one behind.  And so in the end, Lexa’s assurances that she knew what to look for should anything go wrong, and Clarke’s insistence that Raven and Abby were strong enough to fight this once their minds were their own again – alongside the knowledge that they no longer had the ample window of time they thought they did – managed to persuade him, and by the time the funeral-carriage arrived early that morning to retrieve the coffin bearing Thelonious Jaha’s bloodless corpse inside it, he had yielded to the girls’ persuasion and agreed – albeit reluctantly – that the risk of being caught inside the house with Rebecca after the sun went down without all thirteen talismans in hand was simply too great.

Once the street had emptied of mourners, and Chancellor Lane was once more uninhabited, they waited a few minutes to make sure the coast was clear before Marcus and Clarke embarked upon the first phase of their bold, risky plan, the success of which all depended upon one very simple question –

_Was the blue wash basin still in Abby Griffin’s bedroom?_

If it was not, they were lost, and all hope of saving Raven and Abby would vanish along with Rebecca.  But if it was . . . if Lexa was right, and the last traces of the good man inside Thelonious Jaha had rebelled at the last and fled before Rebecca could force him to cause further harm to Abby Griffin . . .

Then maybe, just maybe, he might be only minutes away from holding the woman he loved in his arms once more, and knowing she was safe.

It was this thought, and this thought only, which propelled him as he led Clarke across the deserted street, as swiftly and stealthily as they could, to duck around the side of the house and into the back garden where they could enter Number Ten unseen from the street. 

It was an odd and unpleasant sensation, breaking into one’s own house like a thief, and as Clarke slipped her mother’s house key into the lock and pushed the back door open, she felt a curious prickle of fear overtake her.  They entered through the servants’ door, arriving in a small dim hallway at the back of the house with a narrow staircase that led up to the bedrooms.  The hush around them was unearthly; eight people lived in this house (three upstairs and five down) and even in the dead of night, when the whole house was sleeping, it still pulsed with life.  But now they walked through it in hollow, echoing silence, as though it were a dead thing, a desiccated shell of itself, and Clarke found herself wondering if her home would ever feel like home again, after the dreadful things that had taken place here – or if this silent, hollow, empty husk was the house’s true self, and the vibrant life they had brought into it were only an illusion.

“Would you have come home, if you knew we still lived here?” Clarke asked Marcus suddenly – breaking the silence for the first time since they had entered the house – as they reached the top of the steps and stood before the closed door to Abby’s bedroom.

He turned and stared at her, astonished.  “Clarke, what on earth –“

“It wasn’t difficult,” she said.  “That first night, you seemed so very _surprised_ to see us.  Which seemed rather queer.  I was ever so puzzled about it.  Until I remembered something that Mother said once.  For years after you left, every time she saw Miller in town, she would ask him what news he had of his master, and he would always tell her whatever you had mentioned in your letters about where you were and what you were doing.  And every time, he always said to her, ‘Mr. Kane sends his best good wishes to the Griffins and hopes their family remains well.’  And then one day, he stopped.  She asked him how you fared in India, he responded readily enough, and then . . . the conversation simply ended.  And it was clear to her that Miller was uncomfortable, that he knew she expected him to say the thing he always said to her – ‘Mr. Kane sends his best good wishes to the Griffins’ – and the fact that he did not say it meant that you had not written it in your letter.  And Miller never said it to her again.  It was as though you had forgotten about us.”

“Clarke,” he said helplessly, but she did not let him finish.

“It was after Mayor Jaha moved away,” she explained.  “And it only occurred to me, seeing your face at our door, seeing the way you looked at her – I wondered to myself, could it have been possible that someone, somewhere, wrote you that your neighbors across the street had gone, but instead of Thelonious, you thought it was _us.”_

“The house-agent,” he said shortly, unable to look into her eyes, confirming everything she had supposed in just those few words.  She nodded, as though this was the answer she expected.

“You would never have come home if you had known we were still here,” she said, but her voice was kind and there was no judgment in it.  “You wanted to forget about us.  You didn’t even write.”

“Clarke – “

“How long have you been in love with my mother?”

Silence.

The soft, oppressive hush gathered around them in the hallway became charged, anticipatory, as though the house itself were waiting for his answer.  And though it was tempting to deny it, to demur, to put off this moment of inevitability, he knew in his bones that there was no longer any purpose to be served by resisting. 

“All my life,” he finally told her, in a low, resigned voice.  “How long have you known?”

“All my life.”

They looked at each other for a long time, there in front of Abby’s bedroom door, as the dull watery light of late afternoon cast a dingy glow over his gray wool suit and her dusty rose muslin dress, making them both appear blurred, insubstantial. 

“You should know,” he said hesitantly.  “Your father – I never . . . that is to say, when they were – “

“Really, Uncle Marcus,” sighed Clarke, in something like fond exasperation.  “Sometimes your strict sense of propriety appears to accomplish nothing save making your own life more difficult.  Of course I know how deeply you loved my father.  Of course I know you would never have dreamed of interfering in their marriage.  Of course I know that you left because you thought it would be easier for both of you if she could simply forget you existed.  And of course I know that it was your guilt at being half a world away when he died and we needed you that kept you from coming home for the funeral.  None of those things ever need to be spoken between you and me.  We have known each other too well for all of that.”

“What an extraordinary young woman you have turned into since I left,” he said, staring at her in affectionate, though baffled, surprise.

“Like mother, like daughter,” she said simply, then reached for the brass knob and pushed open the bedroom door.

Whether it was by Rebecca’s design, a peculiar little aesthetic flourish, or simply by accident of placement, they spotted the neb ankh right away.  A shaft of weak gray sunlight piercing through the gap in the bedroom curtains illumined it where it sat on the carved wooden dresser beside the wardrobe.  It infused the rich sapphire hue of the smooth porcelain with a sinister, unearthly glow, as though the universe itself were shining a lantern to make sure they did not miss it.

“That’s it,” whispered Clarke.  “That isn’t ours.  I’ve never seen it before.”

“Stay back,” Marcus said, approaching the thing carefully, heart thudding in his chest.  Behind him, he heard Clarke utter a soft exclamation of surprise.

“The rings!” she murmured, and knelt down to the carpet where Abby had, on Jackson’s command, dropped the two talismans that had been her only protection.  But Marcus was only half-listening.  He advanced slowly, carefully on the dresser, reaching out his hand, bracing for some disaster he knew not what, and grasped the basin of water carefully with both hands.

Nothing happened.

“They must be able to pass as ordinary objects in the presence of ordinary people,” Clarke observed, seeing his expression of puzzlement.  “Otherwise they’d be little use to her as hiding places – if a bolt of lightning struck you in place every time someone laid hands on it.”

“That’s true,” he allowed, lifting the basin to eye level and examining it with care as Clarke moved to join him.  Sure enough, there they saw it, etched into the side of the basin – the small, double-looped symbol they were looking for.

Clarke looked at Marcus.

Marcus looked at Clarke.

“Lexa was right,” Clarke whispered, exultation pulsing through her quiet voice.  “She was right.  If Rebecca took all of them – Fox, Raven, Jackson, Mother – if she took them all _inside this house – “_

“. . . then she would have used this talisman to do it,” Marcus finished for her, feeling a sense of triumph begin to rise within his own chest.  “Then this is the one she’s using to control them and they’ll all be freed once we destroy it.”

“Then let’s not waste any more time,” said Clarke firmly, and followed Marcus – basin in hand, taking great care not to risk any adverse effect by spilling the water – down the back stairs, where they made their way through the gardens and lawn behind the Griffins’ house into the untended, overgrown wilderness behind the house next door.

Lexa had been adamant that no _neb ankh_ could cross the threshold of Number Thirteen.  It would, certainly, be far more simple and convenient for her to use the makeshift workshop she had set up with her own equipment in Raven and Abby’s bedroom to destroy the items one by one; but once even one of the items had entered the house, its protections would evaporate like smoke, leaving them helpless against Rebecca’s attacks.  And if the process of destroying the thing went somehow awry, she did not want to run the risk of leaving any piece of it behind in Abby Griffin’s house; nor could she leave Raven and Abby’s side at such a vulnerable time, when the disturbance of one of the _neb ankh_ might cause a reaction she could not foresee, and made it impossible for her to leave them until the deed was done. 

This left Marcus and Clarke with the momentous and discomfiting task of destroying the basin themselves – and there was no safer place to do it than here, in the knee-high grass and thorns of what had once upon a time been Thelonious Jaha’s garden.  Rebecca, of course, already had possession of this property, so the _neb ankh_ would not taint it further; and until the sun went down, Rebecca would not come outside, leaving them safe from her clutches under these waning few hours of dingy fall sunlight.  But it was unsettling in the extreme, as Marcus carefully set down the basin on a patch of smooth, flat ground, to look up and find themselves within only a few feet from the house where Rebecca might yet be lying in wait, ready to strike.

“Are you ready?” Marcus whispered to Clarke as she pulled out of her pockets the supplies Lexa had sent with them.

She nodded.

“Ready,” she said.

And the ritual began.

* * *

They had spent much of the previous day watching Lexa assemble the peculiar set of weapons they would wield, one-by-one, against these peculiar demonic objects.  There was a sprig of rosemary – something they had seen firsthand that Rebecca and her victims could not bear – and a vial of holy water from the baptismal font inside the Cathedral de Notre Dame.  They must wet the branch of rosemary in the water, and sprinkle it on the _neb ankh,_ like a sacred anointing.

“Is it because the water is blessed by a priest?” asked Clarke curiously as Lexa rummaged through her cases before finally retrieving a small, glass-stoppered bottle of some strange red-gold molten substance.  Lexa gave a dry, amused chuckle.

“It’s because holy water tends to be free of chemical and mineral purifications,” she explained.  “Although Titus was far more superstitious than I.  He wanted everything blessed by a priest or a shaman or a white witch before he would consider himself protected.  And for this task, in his honor, it feels right to use his own tools.  But really, it has far less to do with the power of Jesus Christ and a great deal more to do with holding this particular chemical compound in suspension.”  And with that, she carefully let fall a tiny droplet of red-gold from the glass bottle into the vial of holy water.  It did not fade or dissolve or loses its sharp edges, remaining a perfect, tiny, floating sphere, sinking straight to the center of the vial, and Lexa nodded approvingly.

“What is that?” Clarke had asked her, wild with curiosity.

“There is only one thing powerful enough to destroy a _neb ankh_ – and, in so doing, to kill a revenant,” she explained.  “Rebecca is tethered to the earth and cannot die while each _neb ankh_ lives.  The immortal ones shed all recollection of their past selves – their mortal selves – when they are reborn as these soulless fiends.  Titus believed, and so do I, that this was the secret to ultimately defeating her.” 

Marcus swallowed hard, heart pounding, as the pieces began to come together inside his mind.  “Is that – “

“Yes,” she said.  “This is the chemical Rebecca discovered which led to her own death, and the death of three hundred others.” She held up the glass vial, regarding the floating red-gold sphere with an expression of satisfaction.  “We will destroy Rebecca once and for all with the only weapon powerful enough to kill a revenant,” she said.  _“Her own humanity.”_


	8. The Thirteenth Sign

** **

**ABBY**

_Smoke._

She knew what it was, before she realized how she knew it – before her head began to clear and she remembered there was such a thing as smell, before she could articulate a clear though to herself _(“I smell smoke”)_.  There was simply the awareness of the thing, and the dim wondering at the back of her mind about where it had come from and why it felt somehow . . . _wrong._

Other sensations crept back in slowly.  Her cheek was resting on something both rough and soft at the same time, with other scents rising up out of it.  Black coffee.  Perfume.  Sweat.   Dust. 

 _Velvet,_ she realized, sensory awareness finally clicking through the fog and giving the thing a name as her mind began to return to her.  Old and threadbare velvet, soaked with an overwhelming cacophony of scents that suddenly threaten to overwhelm her.  She felt crowded by them, claustrophobic, and even inside the blackness swimming behind her eyelids she felt dizzy, as though she were rocking violently back and forth.

No.  She _was_ being rocked violently back and forth.

Sound suddenly crashed in, as the blur enveloping her continued to recede.  So many sounds, all of them foreign and unfamiliar, clattering and screeching and heavy footsteps and a low rumble that seemed to begin in the earth below her and rise all the way up through her bones where she lay on that elderly, worn fabric that might once have been soft but now chafed horribly at her suddenly impossibly sensitive skin.

Then “Next stop, Dover!” bellowed a voice from the other side of the fog, and all at once the smoke and the clatter and the threadbare velvet all coalesced in her awakening mind into one glaring, impossible question:

_What the hell was she doing on a train?_

* * *

**MARCUS**

**_(Ten Days Earlier)_ **

Marcus and Clarke knelt in silence over the blue basin, hearts pounding heavily in their chests.

“Are you ready?” Marcus asked her.  She nodded without looking at him, staring down into the glassy surface of the water as though searching for something in its cerulean depths.  Marcus gently, carefully removed the stopper of the glass vial full of holy water Lexa had given him and inserted the very tip of the rosemary branch, taking care – as he had been instructed – to allow the needles to brush against that sinister red-gold orb, Rebecca’s fatal invention, which hung suspended in the middle of the bottle like a crimson sun in the midday sky.  The rosemary needles prodded at the bubble a bit, nudging it about, and its surface shivered, but it did not burst or change shape at all.  He withdrew the branch, put the stopper back in the bottle, and motioned Clarke to move back to a safer distance.

“It doesn’t reflect,” she said suddenly, more to herself than to him.  Marcus was startled, pausing in the midst of putting the bottle away to stare at her in confusion.  “The water in the basin," she explained.  "It doesn’t reflect.  Look at it, Marcus.  It doesn’t catch the light.”

“What does that – “ he began to say, then broke off with a horrified exclamation as Clarke suddenly and with no warning lifted the bowl and flipped it very neatly upside-down.  “Clarke, for God’s sake!” he barked, worried panic transmuting itself in his throat to something that sounded like anger.

But nothing happened.

They both stared, baffled, at the upturned basin in her hands.  Not a single drop of water spilled out, or even rippled; the surface remained smooth and flat, as though gravity itself were afraid to come near it.

“I’ll be damned,” Marcus muttered under his breath, fascinated in spite of himself, as she turned it right-side up once more and beckoned him to lean over and peer into it.  She was right; the surface was as gleaming and sleek as a mirror, but even in the light of day it showed nothing but the blue porcelain underneath.

“Now, before you lecture me about what a terrible risk that was,” Clarke said, swiftly cutting off the comment she sensed him formulating as his breath slowed back down to normal, “I had a theory that may turn out to be useful, and it appears it was right.  I wondered, perhaps, if the _neb ankh_ only _appears_ to be a real material object, but isn’t.  So it won’t ever quite have the properties of the real thing.  That is, not a bowl of water with Rebecca's essence concealed inside it, but Rebecca's essence shaped like a bowl of water.  And so it occurred to me, if that were true, it might make it easier for us to find them; of course I know we're to look for the marking, but that could be very small, and well-concealed.  And we haven't as much time as we'd thought we might have, when we begun planning.  But now we know to look for, well, things that aren’t quite real _things,_ if you know what I mean.  And anyway, I wanted to see if I was right before we destroyed it and lost all ability to test my hypothesis.” She looked up at him, at his set jaw and stern, worried face, and could not repress a mischievous half-smile.  “Well, all right, I’m finished, and we're running out of time, so now you may tell me how cross you are and how infuriatingly reckless I've been, and I shall promise never to do it again, and you shall tell me you know me a bit too well to believe _that,_ and then that shall be an end to it, so we can proceed.”

"Do you need a second actor for this performance or do you prefer always to play all the roles yourself?"

"You should feel free to add your own rhetorical flourishes, if you like."

"Very well, then, I should like to request, at the very least, that we attempt to return to Lexa with _fewer_ patients for her to tend rather than adding to them.”

"That was a bit soft," she chastised him, "a true fatherly lecture ought to have at least one bit where you shake your finger at me in stern disapproval.  Still, you are rather new at this, and one must make allowances.  I expect by this time next year you shall have mastered it." 

Marcus was not at all certain what sort of response to give this rather confounding series of statements, but fortunately she did not seem to expect one, waving him rather impatiently back toward the bowl.  "Now shall we get to work?”

He nodded.

"All right," he murmured, heart in his throat, as he reached out the rosemary branch with a trembling hand.  He felt her move close to him, as though she too were suddenly hesitant and uncertain, so he did something he had never done before - he reached out one strong arm and wrapped it tightly around her shoulder.  It was tentative at first, as though he were not sure whether this was permitted; but she sank into him gratefully and let him hold her close against his chest.  Then they squeezed their eyes shut, held their breath, and Marcus gently tossed the rosemary branch into the basin.

The effect was instantaneous, and terrible.  The moment the rosemary needles which had touched the red liquid met the _neb ankh_ , they heard a piercing shriek as a hideous, sickly green flame erupted and swallowed the basin up completely from their sight.  

“Get down!” Marcus ordered Clarke, and when she froze, panic and astonishment on her face, he pulled her down into the grass away from the flames, his body between the heat and her as a shield.

“What is that?” she cried out over the echoing, terrible screaming that seemed to be coming from inside the _neb ankh,_ as though the bowl itself were crying out in pain.

“Cover your ears!” he called back, the deafening sound nearly carrying his voice away.  She did – they both did – but it could not drown out the banshee wail bursting forth from the green flames before them.  The cry sounded like a woman’s scream of pain, high and shrill and laced with sheer terror, and some part of Marcus which he refused to consciously acknowledge knew – without knowing how he knew it – that somehow the _neb ankh_ had captured a death scream from ninety-seven years ago as a French woman scientist was burnt alive by a chemical explosion.

They were listening to Rebecca die.

He pulled Clarke close into his arms, pressing his face down into her soft fair hair.  “Don’t listen,” he commanded her over and over.  “Don’t listen to it, Clarke, it will be over soon.”

“I’m frightened.”

“I know.”

The wail was joined, suddenly, by a sick, terrible echo, muffled somehow as if coming from a far distance, and Marcus realized with horror that it was coming from inside his own house.

Raven and Abby – and somewhere, God willing, maybe Jackson too – were shrieking in pain as though Rebecca’s death were their own.

“It’s Mother!” Clarke cried, struggling to get up.  “It’s Raven and Mother, Marcus, we have to stop this, we have to put the fire out – “

“No, Clarke, we can’t,” he told her, pulling her back as she lunged for the flaming basin.  “We can’t, or they’ll never be free.”

“But we’re hurting them!”

“It will be over soon,” he said, with more confidence than he felt, pressing his eyes closed against the sound of Abby’s sobbing, agonized shrieks of pain.  “it will be over soon.”

And then abruptly – with no warning – it was.

In the place where the _neb ankh_ had rested on the dead grass, there was a circle of scorched earth where the flames had risen up from the ground, but inside the circle was empty.  The basin was gone, the ash of Rebecca’s human body from which it had been born swallowed up by the flames.

“Did we,” Clarke whispered, “are they – “

“I don’t know,” he answered her truthfully, helping her to her feet as they dusted themselves off and made their way back out to the street.  As Number Thirteen came in view, Marcus looked up to the bedroom window and saw Lexa looking down at him.

She was smiling.

* * *

**ABBY**

She wanted to open her eyes, but it was impossible.

Whatever was happening to her, whatever had caused her mind to go blank and blurry, to wrap her in this fog from which she was only just now emerging, it had heightened and sharpened every sense.  She knew enough, now, to remember that a faint aroma of coal smoke rising up out of the faded velvet of the cushions in a train compartment would not ordinarily strike her with such violent force, that the clatter of metal on metal ought not to be so deafening.  Through her tightly-closed eyelids she sensed blinding, unbearable daylight, could feel its heavy, oppressive warmth against her skin, and she knew if she opened her eyes even a crack, the bright light would be agony. 

And she still did not know where she was, or how she had gotten here.

Which meant, that perhaps, for now, until she got her bearings, it was safer to behave as though she were still asleep.

She concentrated for a long, still moment on nothing but her breath, feeling her chest rise and fall, forcing it to remain steady and even, listening and thinking.  She could hear movement nearby.  Skirts rustling, she thought.  A woman.

Her heart stopped.

_Rebecca._

But no, it could not be Rebecca.  That was impossible.  Because there, at the back of her mind, buried in that fog where the past slipped in and out of focus, as she fought to catch hold of the thread of the very last thing she could consciously recollect, some half-buried scrap of a memory whispered to her that _Rebecca was supposed to be dead._

The revenant was no longer inside her, that much she knew . . . though she could not remember how.  She swam through the fog, frantically hunting for solid ground.  But everything was in tatters, just bits and pieces floating along inside her mind, disconnected, fragmented, unconnected to anything.  

She remembered rope around her hands . . .  and something about Vera Kane, perhaps?  (No, it could not be Vera, Vera was dead and gone, Abby had been there and remembered everything.  She remembered the way the light fog and the net of her mourning-veil gave a curious air of blurred unreality to the churchyard.  She remembered Jacob taking her hand as the coffin was lowered into the ground.  And she remembered Marcus, tall and correct and severe in his black suit, standing blank-faced among the white and gray tombstones like a shadow of himself.  He had been back and forth to London a great deal in those days, so it had been Abby, very often, sitting in the parlor of Number Thirteen, helping Vera take her tea to give a brief respite to Miller and Indra.  It had been Abby who was there when it happened, Abby who looked up from the woman’s bedside to see her son rushing in, the telegram come just on the edge of too late, Abby who gave him her chair and moved back into the shadows so that he could say goodbye, Abby whose gentle hand on his shoulder as he felt the life ebb slowly out of his mother was the only thing keeping him tethered to earth.  No, Abby thought to herself.  Whatever she was trying to remember, it had not been Vera Kane.)

_Think, Abby.  Remember._

There was a girl . . . a foreign girl, a stranger, surrounded by stacks of books, and beside her a bed, where someone in a white nightdress was screaming.  And there had been a blue bowl – but had the blue bowl come before the girl, or after?  She could not remember.  But a blue bowl, yes, with water in it, but something about the water was wrong, something about _all_ of it was wrong, had she meant to tell the foreign girl about the water?  Hadn’t she?  But then she had dropped something, and forgotten . . .

She had forgotten about the blue bowl, and it had made Marcus angry at her.  So angry that he had done something she had never seen him do before in all his life: looked at her with something in his eyes that was not affection.  Something that was dark and sad and furious and whispered of betrayal. 

But that could not be right either, because the blue bowl was in her own house, and how could it be so important that Marcus would –

_House._

The word stopped her.

 _That’s it,_ she thought.  _That was the last thing.  That last thing I can remember.  There was a house._

An empty house – not her own, and not Kane’s either.

A house she was frightened to enter, but the foreign girl had told her she had to.

But why? Why did she have to go inside?  What had she been afraid of?  What had been waiting for her, there inside those cavernous, echoing stone rooms where nobody lived?

And _how_ _had she gotten from the house to this train?_

 _The bowl,_ she remembered suddenly.  Someone had broken the blue bowl . . .

And then there had been pain, terrible, searing pain, and then quiet, and then she had opened her eyes and Clarke had been there, and taken her hand, and led her to the stone house, and they had all gone inside – Clarke and Abby and the foreign girl and Raven – it had been Raven screaming in the white nightdress, something had happened to Raven, but the blue bowl shattering had saved them both, though Abby could not remember how – and Marcus was there too, but treating her gingerly, like she was made of glass, not unkind, but distant, as though he did not know who she was anymore –

_Glass._

_Shattered glass._

“The mirror,” she suddenly gasped, struggling to sit up, eyes flying open, and then she remembered everything.

* * *

  **MARCUS**

By the time Marcus and Clarke raced across the street and up into the bedroom, Raven and Abby were groggy, but conscious, and unmistakably themselves.  The abrupt departure of the revenant’s influence had left them with peculiarly heightened senses, a symptom Lexa had assured them would fade in a few hours, but for now might prove singularly helpful. 

With only an hour left before sundown, there was no time for them to dress, so Lexa and Clarke helped them to pull dressing-gowns over their nightdresses and slip on their shoes, before helping them down the stairs and across the street, Marcus leading the way to ensure that Chancellor Lane remained empty.  But no one saw the group make their way around the back of Number Sixteen, to the servants’ entrance Miller had found unlocked on the day they discovered Fox missing.  Fortune smiled upon them, and it remained unlocked still, though uncomfortably sinister in the dull, late afternoon light streaming weakly in through the high, narrow, dust-caked windows over the ghostly, white-draped furniture.

Miller had been right when he described the place as deserted, Marcus thought.  Years and years ago, he remembered Thelonious Jaha keeping a veritable army of personal staff, every household matter conducted in the most formal manner imaginable; but now the servants’ hall was like a shadow of itself.  No one had lived here in years.

It was unsettling, but useful; though they would give it a cursory search, it seemed more than probable to the entire party that Rebecca had never set foot belowstairs, and the chances of a _neb ankh_ on this floor of the house seemed very thin.

They made their way up the servants’ stairs until they reached the front hall, where Lexa pulled out her notebook and showed them the queer runic symbols Titus had sketched on the faded pages, with scrawled words and notes beside them.   She had made a tick mark by the symbol marked “Lake,” to mark the _neb ankh_ which had already been destroyed, and passed the book from person to person to allow them to familiarize themselves with the twelve others before they set to work.

They were able to locate several right away with very little trouble.  Raven and Abby had a kind of vague instinct for which rooms possessed one, and Marcus remembered more clearly than he would have imagined which items in Thelonious’ house were things he remembered having seen before.  This grandfather clock had always stood in the hall, for example, and the tables and chairs had belonged to the previous mayor.  But an odd little potted tree, sitting on the hall table in the kind of elaborately painted blue and white pot he had seen often in his travels to Japan, seemed so singularly unlike Thelonious that he waved Lexa over to examine it right away.  Clarke’s theory proved correct once more, as they noted the tree’s green needles bore an artificial uniformity, and even before Lexa had detected the tiny infinity symbol carved into the bark he was certain of what he had found.

“Excellent work,” said Lexa approvingly, and he watched her draw a tick mark with her pencil over the rune labeled “Tree.” 

It was Raven, shortly after, who found the next one hanging directly above it – a curious, rather surreal painting of a girl alone in the woods, surrounded on all sides by a cloud of bright blue butterflies which appeared to exude their own kind of inner light.  “There,” the girl said, pointing at the painting.  “That’s another.”  And as Marcus looked more closely at the butterflies, he realized she must be right, for there was more to that unearthly blue illumination than what he had taken at first for a clever trick of the painter’s craft; it appeared to emanate from inside the painting itself.

“’Glowing Forest,’’ said Lexa, marking in her book with a nod as Raven removed the painting and set it beside the small tree in one of the crates Lexa had brought with her.  “Very good, Raven.”

“That’s three, out of thirteen, in only a few minutes,” said Clarke brightly.  “I say, we’re doing rather well.”

Her good spirits held as Abby’s residual Rebecca-sense urged them down the hallway and toward the receiving rooms.  “We’ve found all there is to find here,” she told Lexa.  “The parlor next, I think.” 

“Ought we to split up?” asked Raven, as they spread out around the room to search.  “To cover more rooms more quickly?” 

Lexa shook her head.  “You and Abby still do not yet know – nor do I – the full influence of the _neb ankh_ on your mental and physiological state,” she cautioned her.  “Which means we do not yet know whether some unexpected reaction might yet occur in the presence of any of them.  We also do not yet know whether, in fact, Rebecca herself remains somewhere inside this house.”  Clarke shivered at this, and Marcus caught her looking up from the tea table she was examining to cast a worried eye towards her mother.  “We shall stay together, moving room to room as swiftly as we can, but I do not want any of you out of my sight.”

“Was there something in your book about horses?” Marcus asked her suddenly, opening a glass curio cabinet to remove a small earthenware vessel.

“Horses?  No.  Why?”

“It’s only that this appears to be an artifact from the native peoples of the Americas,” he said, holding it out to her.  “A tribe on horseback.  Only Thelonious has never been to America, that I know of, nor ever expressed any interest in it.  It seems an odd thing for him to have.  I don’t see the marking, but I wondered – “

“’Plains Riders,’” said Abby over her shoulder, almost absently, as she pored through the contents of a dusty oak china cabinet.  The heightening of her senses after the revenant’s departure had sharpened her mind too; both she and Raven had taken one look at Lexa’s notes and committed them entirely to memory. 

“I’d forgotten that one,” said Marcus.  “Yes, it does appear as though they’re on a plain of some sort – the ground is flat, but these line drawings could be bits of grass.  But I don’t see Rebecca’s symbol.”

“Look inside it,” suggested Clarke from across the room, then smiling at Marcus’ exclamation of satisfaction as he peered inside the vessel’s mouth.  She waved Lexa over to help her examine a small green table made of wrought-iron, whose legs were molded into the shape of a winding garland of ivy.  “Revenants hate ivy, you said,” she reminded Lexa.  “Even the depiction of it.  That’s why Raven tore up Mother’s embroidery.”

“Ah,” said Lexa, who understood immediately.  “So then, why, if even the depiction of ivy distresses a revenant, would she keep one in her home – “

“Unless it were a _neb ankh,_ with none of the actual properties of the real thing.”

“Very clever,” said Lexa approvingly, and – after they located the symbol etched into the underside of a leaf – carried it and the stoneware vessel out to the crate in the hallway, marking “Leaf” and “Plains Rider” off her list.

They made quick work of the sitting room and dining room as well, where a peculiar abstract glass statue and a German Romantic painting of a man by the sea gave them “Ice” and “Blue Cliff,” respectively.  Abby and Raven’s heightened senses led them to bypass the kitchen and work rooms that made up the remainder of the ground floor, and led the group instead up the sweeping, curved staircase to the upper level of the house.

Thelonious’ private study at the top of the stairs met them first, and tugged at Abby’s senses most strongly.  The rune labeled “Boat” was first and easiest to cross off, after Marcus spotted a delicate, ornate ship inside a glass bottle whose hull was marked with an infinity symbol, followed shortly by “Shallow Valley”, the title of a book buried on a shelf which appeared rather brighter and less faded than the others stacked beside it.  But Abby was certain the room contained a third, and insisted they continue hunting even though nothing else seemed at all out of place.

“How many are left still to find?” Raven asked, poring through heaps of papers on the desk in the corner. 

Lexa paged through her notes. “Four,” she said.  “Stone, Delphi, Sand, Sky.”

“Delphi?” asked Clarke curiously.  “Like the place in ancient Greece, or Egypt, or wherever it was, with the oracle?”

“Possibly,” Lexa shrugged.  “I am not entirely sure.  Titus’ notes were very thorough for some, and frustratingly vague with others.  Some are translations from ancient texts, which many not have had an English counterpart, or were deciphered from his father’s notes, which were difficult to read.”

“Well, nothing in this room looks Greek or Egyptian,” sighed Clarke.  “Mother, are you sure there’s a third _neb ankh_ in this room?”

“I’m certain of it,” said Abby.  Raven nodded her agreement.

“Well, it must be hidden then,” the girl sighed in enormous frustration.  “I haven’t seen an infinity symbol anywhere, and I haven’t spotted anything unusual – except this funny old compass which doesn’t seem to point north, but I don’t see how that could mean ‘stone’ or ‘sand’, so I suppose it’s nothing.”

Marcus’ head snapped up.  “A compass?” he queried her curiously, then crossed the room briskly to tug the book out of Lexa’s hands, pointing to the symbol labeled “Delphi” – a circle with four arrows pointing inward towards the center.

“Look,” he said, as they gathered around him.  “Arrows at north, south, east and west, but pointing in instead of out.  A real compass is magnetized, so it can find true north; but a _neb ankh_ without the properties of real matter wouldn’t be.”  He took the compass from Clarke and turned it about in his hands; the little brass arrow spun uselessly with every movement of his hand, anchored to nothing.  On a whim, he unscrewed the tiny brass case and prised it apart to examine the underside of the compass, and there they saw it – four arrows etched into the metal, pointing inward at a tiny infinity symbol in the center.

“Only three more,” said Raven as they made their way out into the hallway, but Lexa did not hear her.  She was looking over her shoulder at the window behind them, where she could see the sun beginning to sink lower and lower in the sky.

Marcus followed her eyes.  “Had we better destroy the ones we have, while we can?” he asked her quietly.  “To ensure that we do not miss the opportunity to weaken her?”

“I have grave reservations about splitting up the group,” said Lexa apprehensively, but Clarke – overhearing them, shook her head.

“Marcus and I did it once, and we can do it again,” she told the young doctor.  “You stay with Raven and Mother, to keep an eye on them, and find the last three.  But I believe he’s right, we had better make sure to destroy the ones we have while the sun is high and we know it’s safe.”

Lexa looked from Marcus to Clarke before sighing her reluctant consent.  “Very well,” she agreed finally, “but go as quickly as you can.  We’ll bring out the others as soon as we find them.”

Abby looked as though she wanted to say something; Marcus received the distinct impression of a strong emotion, forcibly held in check.  But she said nothing, merely pressing her daughter’s shoulder as she passed and giving a small, nod to Marcus, something strange inside her eyes.  She had barely spoken to him or looked at him since they entered the house, the memory of the library floor still pulsing in her mind, and they both found themselves profoundly grateful for the normalizing presence of the three girls.  Neither knew what they would do or say if they found themselves alone together.  Still, she appeared curiously reluctant to watch him leave her, and as he turned his back to follow Clarke down the stairs he could not shake the feeling that something was wrong.

Best to burn the crates of _neb ankh_ as fast as they could and get this over with, he thought, and then all would be well.

His worry for Abby grew as he and Clarke laid out the objects all over the lawn and one by one, brushed twigs of rosemary against Rebecca’s chemical compound to ignite them into a row of terrible screaming infernos.  But the noise from the green flames drowned out every other sound, so he did not know, until it was too late, what was happening on the second floor of the house behind him.

He did not see Lexa, Raven and Abby make their way through the last unexplored door – the large double suite which comprised the Jahas' bedchamber. 

He did not see Raven make her way toward Thelonious’ side of the room – separated by an arched doorway from his wife’s – guided by her revenant instinct toward the hourglass on the nightstand. And he did not see Lexa drift temporarily away from Abby’s side to join her, nodding her head in approval and marking a tick next to the rune labeled “Sand.” 

He did not hear Abby move away from the others, through the arched doorway into Rebecca’s half of the suite, and murmur the word “Sky” to herself as she stood in front of the mantel, regarding a massive gilt mirror in the shape of a flaming sun . . . and in which she could see no reflection.

“I found one,” she said to the others, but her voice was carried away by the first of the agonized, deafening screams from the burning _neb ankh_ outside as Marcus lit the butterfly painting on fire.  “Lexa, I found one.” 

But Lexa did not hear.

No one heard.

So she sighed, and stepped up onto the low marble ledge of the fireplace, a few inches off the ground, in order to get closer to the hook in the wall where the mirror hung.  It was vast, and unwieldy, but she managed to lift it off its nail and wrest it to the ground in her arms, calling fruitlessly to the others once more through the muffled but still dreadful screaming coming from outside.

She shivered at the sound.  She knew, as well as Marcus had, exactly what she was hearing.  They were listening to Rebecca die, over and over again, and as wicked as the revenant was, the human woman she had once been had not deserved this fate.

“I’m sorry,” she said unexpectedly, lifting the mirror in her arms so its glassy face – a simulacrum only, a mirror that was not a mirror, reflecting a shadowy vision the room behind her but not herself – was visible to her once more. 

Then, “Hello Abby,” the mirror answered back in a cool, pleasant voice, and as Abby stared into its depths, paralyzed with horror, she watched the reflection of the wardrobe door in the mirror behind her creak slowly, slowly open as a red-clad shape began to emerge.

She whirled around, panicked, desperate, dropping the mirror onto the hard wooden floor and shattering it into hundreds of pieces. But she did not care.  She could do nothing except stare in pale, wide-eyed horror at the wardrobe – now standing innocuously closed, as though it had only been open _inside_ the mirror.

“Rebecca,” she whispered hoarsely, sinking to her knees and scrabbling frantically through the shattered fragments for some trace of the woman in red, as Lexa and Raven came rushing in.  “Rebecca.  Where are you?”

“Abby, you’re bleeding!” exclaimed Raven, barely audible over the howling screeches coming from outside, but the older woman did not hear her.

She did not see the crimson gash now sliced across her palm, or the tiny, glittering sliver of _neb ankh_ glass embedded in it.  She did not hear Lexa scream at Raven to stay back as she wrapped a handkerchief around her hand and swiftly began collecting every last knife-sharp fragment in her crate.  She did not hear the howls from outside die down, the two pairs of footsteps thundering up the stairs, the frantic cries of “Mother, what’s wrong?” She did not feel herself start to fall until she was falling, until Marcus’ arms caught her just in time and lifted her from the floor.

She heard nothing, as a heavy blackness closed over her head, the glittering speck of glass hidden inside her wound spreading its poison slowly through her bloodstream.  She felt nothing.  And the only thing she saw, as consciousness ebbed away from her entirely, was a shard of broken mirror on the floor in which she could still see Rebecca’s lovely face smiling up at her.

That was the last thing she remembered.

* * *

**ABBY**

“Mother, it’s all right,” said a voice beside her – a voice she recognized, a voice whose every nuance was achingly familiar to her, and even before the fog cleared from her eyes she knew she was safe, that Clarke was here beside her on this train.  “It’s all right.  I’m here.  We’re here.  You’re safe.”

Heart pounding, pulse racing, Abby looked around her wildly, past and present beginning to collide as she finally looked around her and saw where she was.  She had awoken in a private train compartment; she was lying on one bench, Clarke and Raven facing her on the other, though her abrupt awakening had startled them both to their feet.  Clarke reached her first, dropping into the seat beside her to pull her mother into her arms, as Raven knelt on the clattering floor of the train beside her, seizing Abby’s hand in hers.  

“You’re all right,” she told the older woman warmly.  “We’re free, you and I.  We’re free from Rebecca.”

“Loud,” croaked Abby, still relearning how to form words.  “So loud . . . and smells . . .”

Raven nodded, unsurprised.  “Lexa says to expect that your other senses will be heightened for a bit,” she told her.  “You’ll find your thoughts work a bit differently too.  There’s still a kind of a link between us and her, although it only goes one direction, thank God.  But revenants have apparently got terrific senses of sight and smell and hearing – no doubt for some rather awful reasons – and it takes a bit for your body to slough it off.  I’m perfectly well now.  Only I suppose there may be a bit of a delay with you because you were unconscious for so long.  And it took her a bit longer to get that piece of broken glass out of your hand than we'd hoped, which can't have helped either.”

“Unconscious?” she repeated dumbly, as Clarke helped her to sit up.  

“Raven, will you fetch Dr. Van Helsing?” Clarke asked.  “She went with Uncle Marcus to the dining car to fetch us all something to eat,” she explained to her mother, “and they ought to return any moment, but she asked to be told the moment you woke up.  They’ll both be ever so glad.  We’ve all been worried sick.”

“What happened to the mirror?” she asked her daughter, panic rising in her eyes.  “Where are we going?   _Where is Rebecca?”_

Clarke took her mother’s trembling hands in her own.  “It’s going to be all right,” she said gently.  “I’ll explain everything.”

* * *

**MARCUS**

Clarke and Raven stayed to destroy the final two _neb ankh_ – Thelonious’ hourglass, and the broken shards of mirror – as Marcus raced back to Number Thirteen with an unconscious Abby in his arms, Lexa trailing close behind. 

“Is she all right?” he demanded, over and over, voice rising in panic.  But Lexa Van Helsing was a professional, a careful and cautious woman, and she would not answer him until she was sure.  So his anxiety continued to mount higher and higher as he gently set the pale, limp Abby onto the parlor sofa while Lexa gathered her surgical kit and pulled up a chair to examine her.  “For God's sake, Lexa, is she all right?”

“She has not been possessed again, if that is what you are asking,” said Lexa finally, without looking up.  “And she is not dying.  Her blood is still red, and your mother’s silver cross appears not to harm her.  But something is not right.”

“She was cut by a piece of the _neb ankh.”_

“Yes.  She was.  And I do not know yet what effect that will have.”

“How do we cure it?”

“I don’t know.”

“Will she wake up?”

“Marcus, I don’t know.”

“Dammit, Lexa, give me _something_ to hold onto,” he snapped at her, unable to cease his restless pacing, which she patiently ignored.  

“You _have_ something to hold onto,” she reminded him calmly.  “We have collected all the _neb ankh_ and Abby is alive.  Hold onto that.”

Clarke and Raven returned, faces aglow with triumph, and made their way into the parlor to see how Abby fared.  “She’s all right,” Marcus said hastily to the visibly-fearful Clarke, with far more assuredness than he really felt; but it was what the girl needed to hear, and saying it out loud to her made him feel a bit more as though it might be true, easing his own worry somewhat.

“Ought we to have some kind of a sign?” asked Raven, seating herself at the tea table in the parlor and helping herself to the bowl of nuts (another symptom of her recovery from the revenant’s curse – Raven was always hungry).

“A sign of what?”

“That she’s really dead.  I expected . . . oh, I don’t know.  A bolt of lightning?  An earthquake? But _something._   I mean, after all, we’ve destroyed all the bits of her soul, so she must be dead – you said so yourself.”

“I did,” said Lexa, pausing in the act of rolling up the sleeve of Abby’s limp, pale arm, and for the first time the other three in the room saw the young doctor looking ever so faintly rattled – as though only just now realizing that she, too, had been waiting for a bolt of lightning which had not come.

As though wondering, for the first time, if she had done something wrong.

The sun was half set by now, which made them all rather apprehensive.  Clarke and Raven made a tour of the house to ensure that all Lexa’s protections remained intact, while Marcus rang Indra and Miller for dinner and then sat down to watch the doctor tend to the pale, unconscious Abby.

He had spoken hardly anything to her, as they made their way through Thelonious and Rebecca’s house, the urgency of the moment and his fear of what would happen if they were caught there after dark momentarily overtaking his desperate, aching desire to pull her into his arms and kiss her hair and murmur apologies over and over for failing to save her from this.  But it could not end here, he told himself firmly.  She could not die like this, lying unconscious on his parlor sofa, before he ever had a chance to make any of this right again.

He watched Lexa work in silence.  She was carefully cleaning the cut in Abby’s palm with a damp white cloth – soaked, for safety’s sake, in rosemary-infused water.  Abby had no adverse reaction, which reassured them both; she lay still and quiet, as though sleeping, and it appeared that Lexa’s instincts had been correct.  Whatever was the matter with her, whatever had happened when that mirror broke, Rebecca was no longer inside Abby’s body or mind. 

Still. 

Something was wrong.

It was nearly half an hour later – as Indra brought supper in to lay out on the tea table so they could remain in the parlor with Abby – when Lexa finally discovered the tiny shard of mirror embedded in the wound on her hand, and uttered a string of expletives in some foreign language they were all privately a bit relieved they did not understand.

“What is it?” asked Clarke, panic beginning to dawn on her face, but Lexa did not answer.  She snatched up the bottle of holy water and one of the rosemary branches, and as the other stared in blank horror over their bowls of soup and platters of cold roast beef, she plucked the glittering speck from Abby’s hand with a small forceps and dropped it in the tin bowl of rosemary-infused water she was using to clean the woman’s wound, causing an audible hiss.

“Lexa, what on earth – “

“There was glass in her hand,” she said, unstoppering the vial of holy water and inserting the wand of rosemary.  “We did not destroy all the _neb ankh._ There was a piece of one left inside Abby.”

“Good God,” Marcus whispered.  “But you said, if a _neb ankh_ ever crossed the threshold of this house – “

“This was only a piece,” she said grimly, “let us hope it was not enough.” 

Then she tossed the branch of rosemary, which had touched Rebecca’s chemical, into the bowl of water, and flinched.

The scream was loud enough to cause Indra and Miller to come running, but only a fraction of what Clarke and Marcus had endured; and while the bowl did flare up with a burst of green flame, it was only a few inches high and died down again in mere moments.  Abby’s body convulsed once, twice, three times, and then went still.  

“Mother?” said Clarke hesitantly. 

Lexa shook her head.  “She is still sleeping,” she said.  “But she lives.”

“Was Rebecca inside her?”

“Only a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of her,” said Lexa, prodding thoughtfully at the tin bowl where all traces of the glass speck had disappeared. 

“So she’s really dead then?  Was that the last of her?”

“It must have been,” said Raven, picking up Lexa’s book and leafing through it.  “If that was the last piece – and we know that Abby is well and alive – then Rebecca must be dead.  It’s curious, I suppose, that I don’t feel more . . . but then we destroyed all thirteen of the _neb ankh,_ so it must be over.”

“Twelve,” said Marcus, peering over her shoulder.

“Twelve in the house,” said Clarke, her mouth full of sandwich.  “Plus the basin first, don’t forget.”

Marcus shook his head.  “No, count the runes,” he said, a slow cold fear beginning to spread through his body.  “We rushed home when Abby collapsed, but when we left – when Clarke and I went back down to the garden with the talismans – weren’t you looking for _three_ more?  Not two?”

“Oh God,” Raven murmured, suddenly remembering.  “Oh God.  _We missed one.”_

Lexa rose from her patient’s side and joined the others at the table, where they were all peering over Raven’s shoulder at Titus’ notes on the page covered in runes. 

“Count again,” said Clarke rather desperately.  “We got every single one.  We must have.”

But Lexa shook her head, ticking each one off her list as she went.  “Lake first, in your house,” she said, pointing.  “That’s one."

"Tree and Glowing Forest in the hallway, that’s three," added Raven, pointing.  "Leaf and Plains Riders in the parlor, that’s five."

"Ice in the dining room, six, and Blue Cliff in the sitting room, seven," Marcus chimed in.

Lexa nodded, crossing each off as they spoke.  "Shallow Valley, Delphi, Boat in the study upstairs, that’s ten," she said.  "The hourglass is eleven and the mirror is twelve.  Marcus is right,” she told them soberly, looking up from the book. “We missed one. And the sun has set, which means we cannot risk going back inside.”  She pointed to the one symbol left unmarked, a strange cross-hatch of lines, like a ladder.  “It’s this one,” she said. “Titus believed this rune meant ‘rock.’  Possibly ‘mineral’ or ‘stone.’  It’s the only one we have not yet identified.”

“But we tore that house apart down to the floorboards,” said Clarke helplessly.  “If there was anything else inside with that symbol from Rebecca’s necklace, we would have found it.”

“The necklace,” Raven whispered, her eyes lighting up, seizing the young doctor’s arm in a grip so tight her knuckles went white.  “Lexa.  Lexa.   _The necklace.”_

“What about it?” asked Marcus, perplexed, watching the gears inside the girl’s mind begin to whir and spin.  He met Clarke’s eyes, and saw the same confusion echoed there as in his own.

“We’re meant to look for anything out of place with that symbol on it,” said Raven, breathless with excitement and urgency.  “And what could possibly be more out of place than a revenant who _wears a silver necklace round her neck?”_

They all stared.

“Lexa told us that each _neb ankh_ was made of the ashes of Rebecca’s body,” Raven explained, “transformed by her magic into the shape of everyday objects.  And once they’ve been touched by holy water, they resume their natural shape.  Well?  What could be safer than to keep the final, most powerful amulet with her all the time, where no one can reach it?  And since it’s made from her own ashes, no wonder she had no reaction.”

“Like the water in the basin,” breathed Clarke.  “It’s only an illusion of silver.  It isn’t real.”

“My God, we’ve all been blind,” Marcus murmured.  “it was right in front of us all along.  The thirteenth talisman is the _necklace_.”

“That isn’t good news,” said Lexa grimly.  “If the final _neb ankh_ is the necklace, she has no need of a mortal companion to help her carry the others, which would slow her down and make her easier to track.  It means it goes with her wherever she goes.  It means there is no hope for us to end this without confronting her face to face.”  

She looked from Marcus, to Raven, to Clarke, then finally to the sleeping Abby on the parlor sofa.  “It means we must follow her back to the place from which she came,” she told them.  “Back to the home she fled.  Back to the remains of her mortal life, the empty, burned-out house where the real Rebecca died and was reborn as a revenant.  We must follow her to the City of Light – and there either destroy her once and for all, or be destroyed ourselves.”


	9. The City of Light

Abby stood at the railing on the side of the Dover ferry, watching the English Channel go by and the famous chalk-white cliffs vanish behind her.  She felt the wind snapping at her woolen skirts, tugging loose locks of hair free from the neat braided coil beneath her traveling hat.  She closed her eyes and breathed in deeply, inhaling the fresh sharp tang of sea air and salt water – still unnaturally heightened in her nostrils and lungs, though her senses were beginning to return to normal - and she found herself wondering what would happen to her, to all of them, before they crossed the Channel again on their way home.

If they ever did.

It had never been spoken aloud among any of them – the notion that one of them, or more, might not survive this journey.  It had seemed too much like tempting fate.  For days, while Abby had lain in a kind of supernatural stupor, neither awake nor asleep, the others had made their plans, stubbornly pressing onward as though danger could come nowhere near them if they simply refused to acknowledge it.  Clarke had explained everything to her; and while the plan seemed as foolproof as, under the circumstances, it could possibly be, Abby still felt a grim sense of foreboding, as though the crisp clean line that had once been her entirely predictable future was vanishing into a misty fog, and everything before her was suddenly uncertain.

A year ago – a month ago – she had known the entire landscape of the rest of her life.

Then Marcus Kane had knocked on her door, and changed everything.

And now here she was, on a ship bound for France, readying to do battle with a fiend from the depths of hell and hoping to God the people she loved survived.

None of these, she thought to herself, were twists of fate she could ever have predicted.

As complicated as the process of travel was for Rebecca, Clarke explained to her, it had been very nearly as difficult for them.  The most pressing problem was how to find lodgings in Paris. Every obvious solution – a boarding-house, an inn, a hotel – was ruled out, since in a public building where anyone could obtain a room for a few francs, they could not possibly defend themselves against Rebecca.  Lexa had never tested this theory, of course, but she felt fairly certain that if Rebecca simply walked in and purchased a room for the night, it would be, to all intents and purposes, as though she had been invited into the home by the building’s mistress.  What they needed was a building of which _they_ were the masters, and in the end this - like so many others - revealed itself to be a problem that could only be solved with money.

Marcus, who had returned from India a moderately well-off man, was the one who conceived of the ingenious, though costly, solution; he arranged by mail to purchase a small house on the outskirts of Paris and, with the aid of a discreet envelope of additional cash to the house-agent, made provisions not only to expedite all the permits and deeds and filing of papers but also to provide for furnishings to be ready upon their arrival.

Clarke was astonished by this, and privately relieved her mother was not awake to surely veto this extravagant suggestion (a belief which was validated by the expression of shock she witnessed recounting it to Abby on the train). But Lexa agreed with Marcus that it was the only way to be certain; and, after a few moments’ argument, Raven weighed in with her agreement, breaking the tie.   They would arrive in Paris in the late afternoon and would need to spend at least one night there in order to make preparations; and the laws governing the behavior of revenants rendered every more straightforward solution impossible.  So in the end, despite Clarke’s misgivings, there was nothing else to do except buy a house.

How to get Abby there was their next complication.

They could not leave her alone in Arcadia, which was now entirely without protection; but nor could they spare anyone else from the party – least of all Lexa, without whom they could not possibly hope to defeat the revenant – to stay by her side.  The shard of mirror had poisoned her bloodstream, Lexa explained, and while her medicines were successfully staving off its lethal threat, she had no way of knowing how long it would be before the fever cleared and she returned to herself again.  She hoped it would last no more than a few days, and that by the time they arrived in Paris Abby would have regained her strength; but it was hope only, not certainty, and Clarke had taken little comfort in it.

In the end, arrangements were made for the group to travel, for safety, as two separate parties; Marcus as a father taking his daughters (Clarke and Raven) to Paris on holiday, and Lexa as a physician traveling with a patient to a hospital in Austria, whose visit in the City of Light would be limited solely to its train station.  This had gotten them adjoining compartments on the train with very little suspicion, and station porters with stretchers to assist Dr. Van Helsing’s unconscious patient on board.

They had all been anxious, and spoke little between Hope Cove and Dover; Clarke had done nothing but watch her mother with zealous care, Raven by her side. Lexa had been immersed in her work, for the most part, buried in Titus’ notebook and occasionally engaging in quiet conversation with Marcus, who had been unable to keep still and seemed profoundly uncomfortable in proximity to the sleeping Abby.

They had been a bit more than an hour outside of Dover when Raven, exasperated by his pacing and the way his anxiety seemed to heighten Clarke’s, suggested that he and Dr. Van Helsing might be glad of the chance to stretch their legs and venture forth to the dining car to obtain a luncheon-basket for the entire party, while she and Clarke remained to watch over Abby.  Rather fortunately, enough time had passed between their departure and Abby’s waking that Raven had not, after all, had to go terribly far to fetch them; she came, in fact, very near to colliding with them, as they made their unwieldy way back down the narrow corridor, two ample luncheon-baskets in hand.

Senses still heightened, nerves raw, Abby was buffeted by the scent of warm bread and green grapes and a cacophony of new voices long before they turned the corner and opened the door.  The moment they did, she began to feel dizzy again.  It was only two more bodies, true; but it was two more heartbeats and two more sets of footsteps and two more warm human scents, and the compartment suddenly felt overcrowded, stifling, as though the chaos of heat and sound and smell and noise were physical walls closing in on her, pressing down with an almost palpable weight.

It would have been worth it all to see Marcus again, to look up and see those warm brown eyes gazing down at her as he made his hesitant, gentle inquiries – but for the stiffness that had inexplicably returned to his air and manner.  He was kind, but he was distant, and she could not escape noticing that he had gone back to “Mrs. Griffin” again.

She tried to remember _why_ , as Clarke and Raven opened the baskets to hand round plates and serve the luncheon, and Marcus remained unable to look at or address her.  Clarke pressed her mother to eat something, but she had no appetite, immersed in thought.  She could not account for this sudden, baffling change.  Everything between the blue bowl and the broken mirror was still a bit hazy, but surely if she had done something very dreadful under the revenant’s control, Clarke would not have neglected to tell her.

Clearly, something had happened.

But _what?_

Her exhaustion, and the deep sadness that opened up inside her at Marcus’ curious refusal to look at her, caused her to retreat inward, sinking back into the corner of her seat and closing her eyes.  Raven, who understood a bit better than the others how very wearing it was at this moment to be inside Abby’s head, gently suggested – seeing that Abby had no interest in food – that perhaps, as they had paid for the adjoining, smaller compartment as well, she and Abby might perhaps fare better for the rest of the journey with a bit of quiet, and leave the other three to enjoy their meal in the larger one.

Marcus nodded immediately with something like relief; tense and miserably uncomfortable, he held out his hand to Abby to help her out of her seat and towards the door.

The moment their hands met, it happened.

_Warm skin.  The bristle of beard.  The musky male scent of his sweat._

_The sound, low and wild, that broke open inside him as his hips lifted to meet hers, over and over._

_The pressure inside her, glorious, dizzying, mounting and mounting until –_

_Rebecca._

_The rosary._

_The ring._

She snatched her hand away from Marcus as though his touch burned her, flung open the door to the other compartment, and bolted as fast as she could, the ache of guilt and grief inside her threatening to swallow her whole.

No wonder he could not look at her.

She had broken his heart.

* * *

 

The Calais-Paris train arrived in the middle of the afternoon, and they made their way by carriage to the Rue Victor Hugo, just on the other side of the Seine from the Thirteenth Arrondissement, where their plans would finally come to fruition.  

The house-agent had found them a neat, trim little cottage, painted white with black shutters, and pleasantly-appointed inside. An envelope of cash is, of course, an international language, and while Marcus’ sense of propriety was mildly offended that Raven insisted upon referring to it as a “bribe,” it had gotten the job done.  The house was not large, but it was certainly sufficient to their purposes for one night, with a modest living area below adjacent to a rather nice little kitchen, and a staircase between the dining room and parlor that led up to a pair of bedrooms.

Two bedrooms was, at such short notice, even with an envelope of cash at the ready, the best that could be got on Marcus’ salary, so they were forced to make do.  The larger of the three was meant for Lexa – who required the use of its wide oak desk – who would share with Raven.  The smaller would go to the Griffins, with Marcus once more relegated to a sofa downstairs.  But Clarke, if the truth be told, was not so very displeased upon arriving to discover that the house-agent had misread the instructions, placing three beds in one room, and only one in the other.  She would very likely have stayed up until all hours of the morning chattering away in the other girls’ bedroom anyway; and, privately, her mother found it no great sacrifice to take the double bed to herself and be spared Clarke’s tendency to toss and turn and tug away the covers.  And besides, she reflected, there was something rather endearing in the girls’ ability, even in such grim circumstances, to maintain such youthful exuberance and a sense of camaraderie.  They were frightened, yes, but they were still young, and alive.  It did Abby’s heart good to see it.

The cottage had no servants – strangers, after all, were a risk they could not take – so they were left to fend for themselves with the basics of housekeeping.  But there was a small bistro across the street which kept late hours, where Marcus and Clarke made their way to pick up a basket for dinner tonight and one for breakfast tomorrow.  Settled in around the kitchen table with a roast chicken, a loaf of warm crusty bread, a crock of stewed greens and a variety of fruits and cheeses, they ate their fill with gusto to stoke their strength for the long work of tomorrow.

It did not grow any less painful to sit in the same room with this new, unhappy Marcus Kane who could not look at her; but at least, as the hours passed, Abby began to feel more and more like her ordinary self again. The agonizing overstimulation of sight and sound had faded by the time evening came, and once seated at the table with the others, she even found that she could eat.  It was not enough, but it was something, to feel once more like a human being.

But while the disappearance of Rebecca's lingering influence from Abby's heightened senses was a comfort, they all began to find her continued absence more worrisome than reassuring.

Lexa kept a watchful eye out the windows, which she had secured upon arrival with rosemary and ivy and rows of silver coins, but the revenant did not appear.  They were under no illusions that she was unaware of their presence, and they felt all the more uneasy that she chose not to reveal herself; but after several hours went by with no sign of her, they ceased their vigil and decided they might as well all make their way to bed.  The ladies recused themselves upstairs to give Marcus his privacy in the sitting room below, and Abby bid the giggling, chattering girls an amused goodnight before retiring to her room and finding herself finally, for the first time, alone.

Marcus had lit a fire in both bedrooms upon arrival to take off the November chill, and by the time she arrived to undress it was warm enough to sleep only in her chemise, which was all she now had with her.  Indra had not asked why it was that the half-possessed Abby, tied to the bedposts, could not bear the sight or feel of her own white nightdress after that night in the library; but she had burnt it for her without asking questions, and loaned the woman one of her own instead.  But here she had no need for Indra’s borrowed flannel.  It felt indulgent, almost wicked, to move about in rooms that were not hers wearing nothing against her skin but a gossamer-thin slip of white silk, but against the luxurious warmth of the fireplace her old, voluminous nightdress would have felt stifling.

Rather unexpectedly she found, as she neatly folded her clothes away for the morrow, that she was not in the least tired, although she knew she ought to sleep.  But drowsiness did not come; her mind would not be silent, and her senses remained sharp.  She settled herself in the leather armchair in the corner and made a game attempt upon one of the beautifully-bound but tedious-looking books on the mantel.  But the dull chronology of the evolution of Gothic architecture she had selected at random neither interested her enough to distract her, nor bored her enough to make her sleepy; so, after half an hour or so, she cast it aside with an irritated yawn, as wide awake as ever.

She was contemplating, with increasing desperation, attempting a search for a yet _more_ boring book, when the sound of a creaking floorboard from the room below caused her heart to leap in her chest, alerting her that Marcus was still awake.

Marcus.

Downstairs, alone.

She had not had a moment alone with him since that terrible night on the library floor, nearly a fortnight ago, and the temptation was nearly unbearable.  Not to kiss him again, if he did not want her to – which he surely never would again – but only to explain herself.  Only to be Abby and Marcus to each other once more, even if only for a moment.  She found herself drawn inexorably toward the door, hand outstretched, her mind a tumult of exhilaration and terror, whispering _what if, what if, what if,_ with the throbbing, pounding rhythm of a martial drum.

What if she opened this door and stepped out into the hallway, wearing nothing except this wisp of white?  What if she tiptoed down the stairs into the room where Marcus was at this very moment lying on a sofa, not sleeping?  What if this time –

She could not.  She dared not.

But she _could._

 _No,_ said a calm and rational voice inside her.   _No.  You can never do that again._

It was too soon, after such a horror as she had inadvertently forced him to endure; and to replicate it so exactly in every particular felt cruel.

She wondered if it were some kind of twisted blessing, that she should have no clear memory of the days since the dreadful thing had happened.  It had been painful enough from the train to here, which had been a matter of only a few hours, to watch him so painfully unable to look at her.

With Lexa, he could converse easily, and some new intimacy had sprung up between himself and Clarke that felt very nearly familial.  Even Raven, it seemed, had penetrated that heavy iron shell.  

For Abby alone he had no words.  

And from the moment it had all flooded back to her, she could not look at him without aching, without a hot searing knife of guilt slicing into her heart, endlessly reliving that moment on the library floor.  That moment, before she had quite realized what was wrong – for he had put the pieces together before she had – where she felt him sit up and push her, with all his strength, off her chest and onto the floor as though her touch were poison.  There had been such horror, such disgust in his eyes.  She could not blame him for it.  She had betrayed him in the worst way a person could be betrayed; and the fact that she had not known she was betraying him made little difference, really, in the long run.

It was like some sort of curse, she thought to herself. Rebecca’s most magnificent revenge - that the moment she had finally begun to realize she was in love with him, she found herself cut off from him forever.  The bitter irony of it all.  He could hardly keep his seat in the same room with her, and would never want to touch her again; and because it had been her own body which Rebecca turned into a weapon, she was powerless to make any of it right.

She turned away from the door and did not look back.

 _You lost a man you loved once,_ a voice murmured inside her mind.   _You survived.  You will survive this too._

 _No,_ whispered another voice.   _I cannot endure this same agony twice._

Who would she be, if they returned to Arcadia and Marcus left her again, boarding another ship to sail across another ocean, lost to her forever?  How would she go on, now that she knew the thing she now knew?

He had been gone, the last time, for ten years.  She had waited nearly three before finally surrendering to the heartbreaking inevitability of it, before she stopped searching through every morning’s post for a letter that would never come.  She had not realized, then, how he felt, or why he had vanished from their lives so utterly.  But she knew it now.

He had left to salve the wreckage of a broken heart.

And she had broken it again.

Marcus Kane was a man who lived behind walls.  But he had let down his guard there on the library floor, had made himself so vulnerable to her, had let her hold him close and see him with no defenses.  He had let her take him inside her and hold him there, warm and soft and close . . . and all that time, Rebecca had been standing between them.  Rebecca had made Abby’s body a secret, slithering, poison thing, beckoning Marcus like a siren to strangle him inside her web.  It had been Rebecca’s red lips kissing his flushed, sweat-dampened skin, Rebecca’s thighs wrapped around him, Rebecca’s voice murmuring into his ear.  Abby felt sick remembering it, but could not press the thoughts out of her mind.  They haunted her.  Even freed from the revenant’s control, she could feel the creature’s cool, clinical satisfaction at having achieved exactly what she wanted.

She had entered Abby’s mind, and she had discovered the blossoming of a wild new love there, and with one touch she had blighted the rose with the touch of her fingertip, like a swift and sudden frost, and suddenly Marcus could not look at her anymore, and perhaps he never would again.

Sensing the hot, aching knot of tears she could already begin to feel rising in her throat, she gave up altogether and decided to make her way to bed, where if nothing else, she could cry in relative comfort.  

She made her way to the dresser to take her hair down for bed and was just reaching up to tug out the first pin when she heard a light knock at the door.  “Come in, darling,” she said absently to what could only have been her daughter, come for a book or her slippers or her dressing gown.  So sure was she that for a long moment, as she rummaged through her packing-case in search of her brush and comb and the little box in which she stored her hairpins, she did not look up.

When she did, her heart stopped beating.

She saw him in the mirror behind her, staring at her from the doorway with wide, dazed eyes, reminding her how very little the chemise concealed or obscured her body from view.  He was clad decently, in a nightshirt and dressing gown, but his eyes moved over her bared arms, the low scoop of silk revealing her back, the shapely calves and bare feet visible beneath the lacy white hem.  Reflected in the mirror, he could see a deep V-shaped neckline that fell low enough to reveal the rising swell of her soft breasts, and the delicate nipples that pressed against the close drape of fabric.

She ought to feel shame, but there was none.  

She stood before the mirror, watching him watching her, for a long, still moment, before he finally spoke.  “You thought I was Clarke,” he said, in a tone of almost apology, and it was so very far from the awkward distance of the previous hours that she had no notion how to respond. He tried again.  “You must have,” he began, “to invite me in, to use  . . . that word. You must have thought I was Clarke.”  She nodded, not disputing it.  “Then I will certainly go, if you would prefer.”

“Stay,” she said immediately, not caring how forward it was, and something like hope lit his brown eyes, as though he had been unsure of his reception.  As though _he_ were the one with amends to make, not her.  She could not understand it.  But he stayed, stepping inside the room and hesitantly, silently closing the door.

“Forgive me,” he said softly.  “For this intrusion, and for the hours of silence which preceded it.  I am so full of things I wish to say, but there has not been an opportunity for me to see you alone, and I . . . I felt I could not speak any of the things which weighed upon my heart in front of witnesses.  And so it has been difficult, all day, for me to say anything at all, as fervently as I may have wished to.”

“Oh,” was all the reply she could muster to this extraordinary speech, and she watched him in astonishment as he moved hesitantly closer to her.

“Before anything else is said,” he began, “I must know if you are all right.  I know that you have said as much, over and over again, every time you are asked; but I know you too well to be deceived.  You speak calmly to reassure your daughter, but I see that you are troubled.  I have been half-mad with worry over the past ten days and to see you return to yourself after so long, after we were all so afraid . . . I confess I have not entirely known what to do with myself.  How to behave in your presence.  There is simply too much in my mind and my heart for me to feel at ease.  But tell me truly, Abby,” he pressed her, his eyes on hers in the mirror, warm and pleading. “Truly.  Do you feel that you are yourself again?  Are you in any kind of pain?  Is there anything that I may do?”

She did not at all know how to respond to this, but she answered the most important part of his question.  “She is gone,” she told him softly.  “Entirely gone.  Raven reassured me the unpleasant symptoms would pass, and they have.  I feel a kind of, I suppose, a _sense_ of her . . . that is to say, I know her to be in Paris, and not far from us.  I know the things she knows.  I have memories I wish I did not, knowledge I wish I did not.  But my mind is once more my own, and that is enough for me.”

“Thank God,” he whispered fervently, and the memory of the library floor came rushing back to her suddenly.  She flushed, and turned away, and could not look at him.

“You were about to . . .”  He swallowed hard.  “You were taking down your hair.”

“I was.”

“May I watch you?” he murmured, and her head lifted abruptly back to him, his eyes warm and vibrant on hers as they gazed at each other through the mirror.  “I have never seen you do it.  I should like to very much, if you will permit me.”

“Clarke often helps me with the pins,” she said, in a voice so quiet he could scarcely hear her.  “It often takes less time with . . . with someone else’s hands.”

It was as bold an invitation as she felt capable of offering before he gave some more definitive indication of what he might be feeling towards her, or how those feelings had changed, but his response to this was very nearly answer enough.  He moved towards her as though drawn by an immutable force, giving her the sense of extraordinary urgency held only just in check – as though he longed to run to her and was exercising forcible restraint.  She watched him in the mirror, and he watched her back, as he stepped in close behind her and reached up a hand, which she could see was ever so faintly trembling, and began to deftly remove the pins one by one.

She had worn her hair bound tight and neat for travel, a long thick braid twisted into a chignon into which she had pinned her traveling hat.  He loosened the dense, silky knot and watched it fall in a thick glossy rope down her nearly bare back.  “Is this how you prefer it?” he asked softly.  “For sleeping?”

She often did sleep with the braid in, but tonight she shook her head, feeling reckless.  So he moved in closer, closing his eyes, and bent to rest his forehead against her soft hair, breathing her in deeply as his hands gently, delicately began to unplait the gleaming strands.  Once all her hair had tumbled free, he combed his fingers through it, eyes still closed, an expression almost of wonder across his face, before opening his eyes and reaching for the silver-handled brush.

“Please,” he murmured, asking permission, and she nodded breathlessly.

He took his time about it, tender and unhurried, gliding the boar bristles through her thick tresses with painstaking and thorough attention, until the surface of it gleamed in the low firelight like a copper mirror.

“I had no idea there were so many different colors,” he said with something like awe pulsing in his voice, running his fingertips over the silky strands.  “I always thought of it as simply brown.  But it isn’t at all.  It’s like a rainbow.”  He set the brush down and ran his fingers through the strands, lifting them to examine in the light.  “Amber,” he murmured.  “And honey, and sand.  And a kind of red-gold, like the leaves turning in autumn.”

“And silver,” she remarked dryly, as his fingers slipped through her hair to the place at her temples that was beginning to go ever so faintly gray, and he smiled.

“I like the silver,” he told her.  “It goes very nicely with mine.”

She turned to face him then, for the first time, suddenly aware of how close they were, and lifted her hand to caress his face.  “Black,” she said softly, running her fingertip along the sloping curve of darkness that arched over and around his lips and down to his square, handsome jaw, slicing neatly through the lighter patches surrounding it.  “But a soft black.  Like shadows.  And around it, gray – almost white – but flecked with bits of darkness, like marble.”  He closed his eyes as her hands slid up from his jaw to his temples.  “And here,” running her fingers indulgently through the velvet softness of his hair, “I can see rich farm soil, and good brandy, and threads of white-silver, like moonlight.”  She traced back along his cheekbones, slowly, indulging herself, and swept her thumbs along his eyebrows.  “You take your tea this color,” she said, smiling, as he closed his eyes, his hands dropping to her waist.  She brushed his eyelashes with her fingertips.  “Pure black,” she whispered.  “Like a night sky with no stars.  And here . . .”  She let her fingertips graze down his cheekbones and ran her thumb lightly, delicately over his lips.  “Sunset,” she murmured.  “The moment when the golden light begins just to turn pink.  And soft . . .”  She closed her eyes, resting her forehead against his.  “Soft and warm,” she whispered.  “Like I always knew they would be.”

He lifted one hand from her waist to cup her jaw, his thumb gliding firmly along her plush bottom lip.  “Roses,” he said, stroking over and over until her mouth fell open to him, warm and waiting.  “Sweet.  You tasted sweet.”  His hands tightened around her waist, his body angling against hers to erase any last whisper of empty space between them.  “Abby,” he whispered, breath coming ragged and frantic.  “Oh God, Abby.”

“Yes,” she told him softly.  “Yes, my love.  It’s me.  Only me.  I’m here, and I’m real.  I promise you, I’m real.”

“You were always real,” he murmured, and then he had no more resistance left.

She was aching so desperately for him to kiss her that the wait seemed interminable, even as she felt him bend his head and part his mouth and move to take her in, and so she leaned into him too, meeting him halfway, hungry and eager and wild.  His hands slid up and down the white skin of her arms, grazed her back, reveled in the feel of her loose hair, brushed back the loose strands from her cheekbones as they cupped her jaw.  He kissed her, and kissed her, and kissed her, until neither of them could breathe and Abby felt so dizzy she could scarcely stand upright.

When he finally pulled away, just enough to catch his breath and let his thunderous heartbeat slow, he leaned in to rest his forehead against her own.  “You were always real,” he told her again. “The fault was mine, for doubting you.”

“Marcus – “

“I failed you,” he said softly, causing her eyes to fly open in astonishment.  “It was me, Abby, I was the one.  I lost faith.  I made you a promise, that I would never leave you alone, that I would never let go of you.  And I failed.  You cannot be faulted for the things you did, with a revenant in control of your thoughts.  I had no such excuse.  I was merely weak.”

“Marcus, no.”

“Lexa told me that the revenant chooses her victims with care,” he told her.  “That she searches for powerful emotional forces, and targets them with unerring precision.  It was she who told me – and it shames me to admit it, that I was forced to hear it from someone else, rather than knowing it firmly in my heart, as you would have – it was she who told me that Rebecca had chosen to exploit your . . . the way you . . . that she chose it for its strength, specifically so that she could turn it against us.  And I permitted her.  You are so strong.  Your heart is so good.  If the positions were reversed, you would never have given in, never have doubted or lost faith.  But I did.  I failed you, when you needed me most.  And it pained me so greatly that I have scarcely been able to bear to look at you.”

She wanted to reassure him with a comforting lie, tell him it was all right, that she had not noticed the way he had retreated from her, but the knot of tears rising up in her throat choked her into silence.  A look of horror came into his eyes and he seized her face in his strong hands, caressing her cheekbones, gazing at her with urgency in his eyes.  “No, my love, no,” he reassured her, “it was not – oh God, you thought it was because I – “

“I thought you were afraid of me,” she whispered, the tears spilling down her cheeks.  “That you could not bear my touch.”

“Never,” he insisted.  “Never.  Oh, Abby, no.  It was never like that.  It was I myself I could not bear.  I felt such miserable guilt when I remembered how that fiend caused me to doubt you, to pull away, to bring such pain into your eyes.  You would have been right to hate me for that.  For failing to trust you when you needed me most.  You would never have lost faith in me the way I lost faith in you, not even for a moment.”

“I could _never_ hate you,” she insisted.  “Never.”

“If there was a way to make it right again,” he murmured, “there is nothing I would not do.”

“Then marry me,” she whispered, and he lifted his head to regard her with astonishment.

“What?”

“Marry me.  Just for tonight.  We can do it properly after this is over.  But be my husband tonight.”

“We don’t have a priest.”

“We don’t need one.”

“Or a wedding dress.”

“My chemise is white, it will do.”

“And we have no rings to exchange.”

She looked up at him suddenly.  “We do,” she murmured.  “Yes, Marcus.  Just for tonight.  Yes we do.”  And in one swift movement, she lifted the cord from around her neck bearing Jacob Griffin’s ring, placed it around Marcus’ neck, and slipped the hastily restrung beads of Vera Kane’s rosary from his wrist to his own.  “There,” she murmured.  “You loved Jacob, and I loved Vera, so they will still keep us safe.  And now we have exchanged tokens that bind us as one family.  One blood.  Now, for tonight, you are my husband.”

“Abby,” he whispered, too stunned to speak.

“Take me to bed,” she begged him, hands tangling in his hair.  “Not on the floor.  Not rushed and hasty, in our nightclothes.  Properly, like man and wife.”  And as he stared at her, she made her way to the door and turned the key in the lock with slow, deliberate assuredness. Then time stopped, the world stopped moving, the stars ceased their journey through the night sky, as Abby lifted the wispy white chemise over her head and let it fall to the floor at her feet, like a snowdrift, standing entirely naked before him.

Instinctively, like a gentleman, he averted his eyes from her, but her soft, reassuring whispers drew him back.  “Look at me,” she said.  “I am yours.  Only yours.  Look at me.  And let me look at you.”

“Abby,” he whispered, wide eyes raking hungrily over her white skin, glowing in the dark shadows.  “Abby.”

“Let me look at you,” she pleaded again, and so he swallowed hard, tugged off his dressing gown and shed his white nightshirt to make his way towards her.

The firelight burnished his skin into a coppery sheen as he strode across the room like some kind of Roman god, all taut muscle and thick curling hair.  She gazed at him him greedily, feeling warmth swell within her at the sight, and although she was not yet quite brave enough to lower her eyes to the shadowy bulk between his thighs without blushing, she felt wave after wave of pure want break over her like the ocean crashing into the shore.

They were like sunlight and moonlight colliding –  Marcus golden-bronze and pulsing with warmth, Abby cool and white and soft - and when he finally took her in his arms, the thing that crackled between them felt like a lightning bolt.

“There has never been another woman for me,” he murmured, burying his mouth in her throat and whispering in her ear.  “There has only ever been you.  Be my wife for tonight, and for all the nights after, and you will have granted me the deepest and most profound desire my heart has ever known.”

“I am yours, if you will be mine,” she breathed, breaking off into a fluttering gasp as his lips trailed over her collarbone, silky-coarse beard bristles sweeping a rosy flush across her white skin.

“I was always yours,” he said hoarsely, voice hot with emotion, hands gliding up her bare back as he kissed her throat.  “I have wanted you all my life.”

“I am so sorry I kept you waiting so long while I caught up to you,” she whispered.  “But I am here now.  Here, and ready.”

“May I really . . .”  He swallowed.  “May I really . . . touch you?”

“Oh God, Marcus, I think I shall die if you don’t,” she murmured as she felt his hand slide down her back, slipping over the white skin of her thighs to chase the warmth he could sense between them.  “Please,” she breathed, resting her forehead against his shoulder, letting him pull her close.  “Make me ready.  Please.”

Timidly at first, as though touching something impossibly delicate, his fingers moved through the folds of warm velvet and parted them to find her aching, pulsing center.  She melted into him with a soft little sigh that made his heart stop, one hand slipping around his waist to help keep her balance, the other moving lower, between their bodies, until – with a sharp, hissing intake of breath – he felt her fingertips graze over the aching flesh between his thighs which had already rapidly begun turning to iron the moment her chemise fell to the floor.

“Abby,” he murmured, stunned.  “What – “

“Let me make you ready too,” she whispered.  “I want to feel you.”

The shock of her touch – the unimaginable intimacy of it – felt revelatory, and he found himself thinking suddenly and rather unexpectedly of the Bible.  How could I be with child, Mary asked the angel, “since I have not known man?”  That had been what everyone he knew always called it - when it was spoken of at all.  But the word _"known"_ had never felt right to him.  It had always seemed such a peculiarly distant, inapt euphemism for the thing men and women did together, and as pleasurable as he had ever found it, there had been very little in the act that felt like _knowledge._  It was, after all, a thing animals did; there seemed little cause to connect it to the activities of the mind at all.

But _this._

 _This_ was knowing.

This thing they were doing to each other, in this moment, exploring each other with delicate, gentle touches, grazing light fingertips over the hidden secrets of each other's flesh they had never felt, or seen, or even dared to imagine before.  There had been no time, on the library floor, to take this kind of journey, but tonight they had all the time in the world.   _I have known woman,_ he thought to himself as her chin pressed into his collarbone, the soft rippling whisper of her breath warming his skin, as one arm tightened around her waist to run a warm palm up the ridge of her spine, while the other danced lightly along the pulsing dampness between her thighs.  He felt himself wanting to taste her there, and was shocked at himself.  There were things one did with French girls, and things one did with wives, and surely no proper English lady would permit a man to –

 _“Oh,”_ gasped Abby, startling him out of these dangerous reflections, as his fingertip grazed lightly over a tight little bud of flesh concealed within her silken folds.  Her breath caught in her throat and he felt her begin to tremble against him, her hips shifting almost involuntarily to bring his touch back to the same place.  He obliged her willingly, tracing light circles around the little bud with the tip of his finger, and was rewarded by a fervent intensifying of her deft, firm strokes, there at that place where she held him in her hand in a way that he could never have imagined Abby Griffin would ever do.  He felt himself swell towards her, the heat rising up from within and reaching out to draw them closer and closer together.

No one had ever touched him like this.

No one had ever looked at him like this.

 _Knowing_ was, all of a sudden, the only word that felt right.

Then something extraordinary happened.  The warm wetness that quivered beneath his touch began to pulse and shift as Abby arched her back and closed her eyes and let out a soft, wild cry before shuddering to stillness against his chest.

He stared down at her.  A drowsy smile had overtaken her face as she purred a soft little sigh, and though her hand had not stopped moving the rest of her felt liquid, boneless, impossibly yielding and soft against him.

“My goodness,” he said hesitantly.  “Was that – did you – “  She nodded, burrowing closer against his chest.  “But I did not,” he began.  “We did not – that is to say, I only touched you – “

“Outside,” she said helpfully, seeing him at an entire loss for words.

“Yes.”

“I like it very much that way,” she sighed, sounding quite pleased.  “Very many women do, I believe.”  She pulled back from him a little, just far enough that he could see her rather impishly smiling.  “And to your surely inevitable second question,” she said, releasing her hand from his flesh and making her way over to the bed, “the answer is – right away.  Unlike you, I have no need of a rest between to make myself ready again.” His eyes widened.

“You don’t?”

She shook her head.  “Ladies do not like to be kept waiting,” she informed him wryly.  “So I have taken the liberty of making you ready enough to begin, but not ready enough to finish.”

“Oh God, Abby,” he murmured, his voice a rough, low groan as he watched her pull back the snowy white counterpane and climb into the bed.

“A marriage must be consummated to be binding,” she reminded him with a faint flicker of mischief.  “Will you not come to bed with your wife?"

“Is this a dream?” he murmured, dazedly making his way toward her.  “If I touch you, will I wake up?  Will I find this all an illusion?”

“When you imagined this before, were we in a tiny cottage in Paris with windows ringed in ivy to ward off spirits?” she tossed back at him lightly, raising one eyebrow.

“I believed I’ve imagined it every way possible,” he murmured back, and even though there was the hint of a laugh in his voice she heard something heavy aching beneath it.  And he felt it too, realized she had understood the words beneath his words.

"You don't just mean . . . lying with me," she whispered.  "You mean our wedding night."

There was no possible answer to this, so he made none, arrested in his his tracks by the force of his memories.  He could not look at her anymore.

"Marcus," she said in a low voice, holding out her hand.  "My love.  Please."

"I am wearing your husband's ring around my neck," he murmured.  "Is this not a betrayal of his memory? Am I a wicked man?"

"You loved him," she said simply.  "You loved me, but you loved him too, and you left us because you thought it was the only right thing to do.  You are a good man, Marcus, and this is no betrayal.  In life, we loved Jacob Griffin and we were faithful to him.  But he has been gone for five years, and I rather believe he would tell us we cannot know what tomorrow may bring, and we have both been lonely long enough.  It is no sin," she whispered, "because we have exchanged tokens and pledged our love, and you are now my husband in all the ways that matter.  It is no sin, Marcus.  It is the only true and right thing in all the world."

And so he reached out, and took her soft white hand, and let her pull him into the warm white cloud of the bed, and then suddenly everything was simple.

He pressed her down into the yielding feathery lightness of the mattress, his body blanketing hers, and let his tongue glide over the white swell of her soft breasts, pressing warm kisses over the rose-petal nipples and smiling as she sighed with blissful delight at his touch.  Her hands slid up his back to tangle in his hair, tugging him down towards her.  “Please,” she whispered, opening her thighs to cradle him against her, and then a heartbeat later, there he was inside her once again.

It had been wild the first time, frantic and desperate, but this was their wedding night and they were determined to take their time.  So he pressed in slow, bit by bit, shivering at the sound of her fluttering gasps of pleasure.  Her hands clutched at him wildly, one tangled in his hair and one digging sharply into the slope at his waist where the ridges of his spine swelled into the taut arc of his muscular buttocks, holding him close against her.

Like the rhythm of the tides, their bodies rose and fell, rose and fell.  The fire began to fade, the stars in the sky shifted overhead, and the world turned, and still they held each other fast, like the survivors of a shipwreck riding a raft of ballast to the shore.  They could not speak aloud to each other their fears for what might happen tomorrow –  that Rebecca was powerful, and hungry for revenge, and their first night as husband and wife might be their last.  So what they could not say with words, they said with their bodies – with touches and kisses and sighs.  The arch of Abby’s hips lifting off the white mattress to pull Marcus deeper inside her.  The warm weight of his hand sliding down to palm her hips.   _Don’t let go of me,_ their bodies whispered to each other.   _Hold me close.  Hold me here._

Abby reached her crescendo a heartbeat before Marcus did, her soft panting gasps rising into something like a moan.  They had struggled mightily to remain quiet, with three girls sleeping down the hallway, but it took all Abby’s strength to bite back a wild, keening cry as Marcus, toppling over the edge, filled her and filled her and filled her, shuddering to a halt and sinking down onto her trembling, sated body.

“I love you,” he whispered, pressing desperate, grateful kisses along her neck and shoulders as the tidal wave subsided.  “I love you.  I love you.”

“I love you,” she murmured back, sliding her hands up his shoulders to pull his head down against her and hold him close against her heart.

He listened to her breathing for a long moment, feeling her chest rise and fall beneath his. “I should go,” he said finally, moving to rise from the bed, but Abby shook her head, arms wrapping tighter around his back.  “Abby,” he said firmly.  “I must go.  If in the morning, my bed has not been slept in – if I am here in your room – “

“No one will give a damn,” she retorted.  “We have no servants, we know no one in Paris.  Whose propriety are you so very concerned not to offend?”

“Your daughter’s,” he said gently, which stopped her in her tracks.  But she shook her head, lifting her hand to cradle his cheek.

“I love you for being concerned for her,” she said.  “I love that she matters so much to you.  But she is not a child, and is less easily shocked than you may think.  Besides, tomorrow we shall all have far too many other worries to spare time for slights against propriety.”  She pulled his head down to hers and kissed him.  “Not to mention,” she went on, with a flicker of mischief, “that I am very likely to want you again in the morning and it would please me very much to be spared a trip down the stairs with no clothes.”

“In the _morning?”_

She laughed at his baffled expression.  “Have you never? It is certainly a thing married people do.  I happen to like it in the morning very much.”

“Well,” he said agreeably, “that will be a very pleasant thing to get used to.”

She shifted her weight from beneath him to lie curled up against him, head pillowed on his chest.  “Stay with me,” she murmured into his ear, and felt him soften, relent, wrap his arms around her to hold her close.  “Stay with me.  I feel safe when you are with me.”

“Always,” he murmured, and pressed a soft kiss on the top of her forehead.

Within moments, they were asleep.


	10. The Last Stand

Marcus slept badly.

He drifted in and out of a restless slumber, Rebecca’s face hovering before him in every dream.  Sometimes she faded in and out, sometimes she was clear as life, sometimes her edges blurred and she turned into Abby.  But she was always there, moving closer and closer.

Knowing it was a mere dream did nothing to assuage the sinister weight of her presence.  This Rebecca might be an illusion, but the very real and dangerous one was somewhere nearby, hovering just out of reach.

After three or four hours of tossing and turning, striving mightily to avoid disturbing the peaceful slumber of Abby beside him, he sank into something which might be called real sleep, only to find himself face to face with the most frightening dream-Rebecca of them all.

They stood facing each other, in a long hallway filled with seemingly infinite doors.  She wore her gleaming scarlet dress, and the silver infinity necklace around her throat called out to him.

“What do you want, Marcus Kane?” she whispered, her hands cupping the golden-brown skin of his jaw, caressing the black-and-grey bristle of his beard with a sinister, terrifying intimacy.  But the dream-Marcus did not pull away.  He moved in closer.  She smelled of dead things, and her voice came from everywhere and nowhere at once. 

“To kiss you,” he heard his own voice say, and then he did.

Her mouth was ice-cold, and tasted like decay, and he could feel her seeping into his warm body and wrapping herself around his bones like a serpent.  This, then, had been what it felt like, when she possessed Raven, when she took Abby.  But they had fought.  They had not asked for her kiss.  He had asked for it.

He had _wanted_ it.

_Why?_

Where was this place, this hallway full of doors, and where was Abby, and why did he need so desperately, with every fiber of his being, to kiss Rebecca’s mouth?

It was not desire.  It was not love.  The revulsion he felt at her touch coursed through him like a tidal wave.  And yet somehow there was a voice – a true one, a voice made of light, a voice he knew he could trust – murmuring to him:

_“It is the only way, Marcus.  You have no other choice.  Let the revenant have you, and trust in your friends.  Together we will do what must be done.”_

_I know that voice,_ he suddenly realized, startling himself awake and sitting bolt upright in bed, chest heaving with panic.

The voice belonged to Jacob Griffin.

“It was just a dream,” murmured Abby drowsily, stirring beside him, awakened by his sudden movement.  She looked up at him sleepily from her pillow, through a tangle of honey-colored hair, and held out her arms.  “Whatever it was, Marcus, it was a dream.  Come back to me, and sleep.”

“I let her take me,” he said brokenly.  "I surrendered.  I let her do it."

Abby shook her head.  "You would never do that," she told him firmly.  "It was a dream. You know her, Marcus.  You know how to protect yourself.”

“I am frightened of tomorrow,” he whispered, his voice as small and vulnerable as a child’s, and sank gratefully down into her strong, slender arms, curling up beside her and letting himself be held, head pillowed on her breast as she pressed kisses into his hair.

“We will keep each other safe,” she murmured, fingering Jacob Griffin’s wedding ring on its chain where it lay against his bare chest.  “I will not let Rebecca take true love away from me now that I have found it again.”

Marcus ran his fingertips over the beads of his mother’s rosary, looped around Abby’s wrist, and thought about the ring burning into his skin, about Jacob Griffin’s voice in his mind, about Lexa’s pendant and Raven’s little silver bird and Clarke carrying her father’s pocketwatch. 

He had no choice, but to trust Lexa.  To trust the silver ring.  To trust his friend Jacob, one last time.

 _I will keep your family safe or die trying,_ he promised silently, as Abby pulled him close and they sank together softly into sleep.

* * *

Morning dawned, cold and clear, and the first rays of sun piercing through the lace curtains bolted Marcus awake, though for a very different reason than the night before.  Abby, with a faint flicker of patient exasperation in her tone, repeated her words from the night before, that he had no obligation to stand on ceremony with Clarke or the girls, and creeping downstairs before they woke to pretend his bed had been slept in was idiotic.  But he insisted, over and over, so many times that she finally was forced to resort to drastic measures, pulling him back into bed and making good on her observation that the things they had done at night were just as pleasurable in the morning.

It had never occurred to him that the act of love could take place in the sunshine. But it felt right to him somehow, as Abby moved above him, rising and falling, the light streaming through the windows casting a golden halo around her soft brown hair.  It felt like hope, and healing.  Last night had been wild and breathless, their bodies crashing into each other with a frantic desperation, like thirsty desert wanderers catching their first sight of fresh water.  But their thirst had been slaked, sated, and that hard urgent edge was gone. 

This was different.

This was _joy_.

She took the lead, hair tumbling about her shoulders as she bent her head down to kiss him, hands braced on his shoulders, hips moving in a slow, undulating rhythm like waves breaking over a shore.  Her lips were warm and soft against his own, the kiss deepening as she shifted her weight to take him deeper inside her.

He looked up at her with something like reverence, at the curved lines of her white body, the pink rosebuds of her nipples, the golden tangle of her hair.  _Never,_ he thought to himself as her hands drifted from his shoulders to brace against the wall behind his head, gazing down at him and smiling with pure delight as she pulled him deeper and deeper inside her.  Never in a thousand years would he have imagined this.  He could never have believed it possible.  He could scarcely believe it now.

Overcome with the urge to touch her, he pressed his palms down into the mattress to lever himself into a sitting position, capturing her on his lap and wrapping his arms around her back to hold her in place.

 _“Oh,”_ she gasped, as his movement changed the angle of entry between them and sent him deeper and deeper still.  “Oh, Marcus, that’s lovely.  Don’t stop.”

“Like this?” he murmured into her hair, meeting the rock of her hips with deep, heavy movements of his own, doubling the force of impact.  She nodded, biting her lip, and wrapped her legs around him to pull herself even closer.

“My love,” she breathed, her hands cupping his cheeks, forehead bent close to his.  “My love.”

“Abby,” he groaned hoarsely, feeling the tidal wave inside him swell and crest and break, as he shuddered to stillness in her arms, slipping his hand down between their bodies to the delicate wet softness where she liked so much to be touched.  She was already near her own breaking point, and it took very little to topple her over, following close behind him with a startled little gasp, back arching in his arms before collapsing bonelessly against his chest with a contented sigh.

“So this is what marriage is like,” he murmured, pulling her into his arms and running light, stroking fingertips over the white skin of her breasts, stirring and soothing her all at once.

She laughed.  “Only for the lucky ones,” she quipped, resting her head on his chest and letting her eyes drift closed again, perfectly content. 

By the time they woke again, an hour later, and she finally permitted him to make his way downstairs to put his clothes on, the girls were already awake, with an animated conversation taking place on the other side of their door.  They descended for breakfast in the heat of a spirited debate about a task Lexa apparently needed done and which of the group ought to do it, with Clarke and Raven disagreeing vociferously.

Lexa had been thorough and clear about the broad strokes of her plan: follow Rebecca to Paris, to the abandoned house in the 13th Arrondissement where she had died and which retained an unearthly hold on her even while it repulsed her with its reminders of her long-shed humanity.  They would go to the house during the day and find the revenant’s nest, destroy it, and be free of her.  But the piece she had omitted was in describing _how_ the revenant would be found.  Her corpse, after all, had been long since burned and transformed into the _neb ankh,_ so the corporeal body she wore with its black hair and red dress was merely a mask.  “It will not be like a tale from folklore,” she told them darkly as they gathered around the table for their breakfast.  “Remember, the revenant is not like the _vampyr_ of the Carpathians, who sleeps conveniently in a coffin filled with the soil of his homeland.  There will be no body to find.  But somewhere in that house, we shall find . . . _something_.”

“But what?” asked Abby.  “And how shall we know it?”

This, it seemed, was the crux of the argument between Raven and Clarke.  Lexa wished to send one member of the party into a lucid dream-state, a notion which Titus had theorized – but never tested – as a way to meet the revenant’s untethered consciousness on its own ground. 

It was risky.  Rebecca’s ability to communicate in dreams had been what first made Raven her victim, and kept her afterwards under the revenant’s spell.  Entering a dream state and seeking Rebecca there was a dangerous move, and all of them knew it.  But Lexa did not know what she was looking for, and there was only one way to find it.

Raven had insisted she be permitted to undertake the experiment, but Lexa had refused.  Raven and Abby had been under the revenant’s control, and there was no telling how that might affect them in a dream state.  This had never been tested.  Rebecca might yet retain some influence over them.  There were too many variables, and Lexa was unwilling to risk it.  And she herself, the only one who had studied the revenant thoroughly, could not be spared to enter an unconscious state; they needed her alert, watchful.

So the only two possible candidates were Clarke and Marcus, and Marcus had lost the debate without ever knowing he was in it.  “My mother will watch over me,” she said to him, “but someone must watch over her.”

“You could do it yourself, if you permitted me to trade places with you.  It might be dangerous.”

But Clarke shook her head.  “Lexa knows how to navigate me through the dream world,” she said.  “And Raven has been taught to master the workings of her equipment.  My mother has some experience in nursing, which may be helpful if something goes wrong.  And you are the strongest of all of us, with the most knowledge of the world, and will know what to do if we should require help.  I only have nothing else to do,” she observed.  “If I should be unconscious for a great deal of time, if something should go wrong, I alone am the one we can spare.”

“I do not believe your mother can spare you,” he said to her gently.  “And if it comes down to it, no more could I.”

Abby could not look at either of them.  Clarke reached out her hand across the breakfast-table and placed it on his.

“I trust Lexa,” she said simply.  “I know you do too.  Trust is all we have.”

He nodded, looking over at Abby, who lifted her face to meet his eyes, tears streaming down her face.  “I cannot lose any of you,” she said.  “Not a one.  God help me, I will bring every one of you home safely.  We can live no longer in fear.  She has already taken too much from us all.  This ends here.”

“It ends here,” Lexa agreed, repeating the words softly and sharing a meaningful look with Abby.  The exchange between them was wordless, but Marcus knew what it meant.  She was giving Lexa and Clarke her permission.   She did not like it any more than Marcus did, but she also knew it was the only way.  And Clarke was no longer a child, after all.  If she had chosen this, Abby could not stop her. 

“Then we’d better get started,” said Raven firmly.  “The sooner we begin, the sooner all of this is over.”

* * *

 Nothing Lexa had told them about the place to which they were headed was sufficient to prepare them for the sight that greeted them on arrival.

They turned off a busy, populous, cheerful thoroughfare into a narrow, cramped road – which seemed somehow gloomy even in the bright morning sun – and then turned again into an alley, where the blackened, crumbling remnants of Rebecca’s house once stood.  Even the practical Parisians seemed to view this corner with something resembling superstition; the carriages and strolling couples and smart little storefronts they had passed on their way felt as distant as if they were on the other side of the world, and what few passersby they met gave the corner a wide berth.

Ninety-seven years ago, Rebecca’s folly had destroyed not only her own life but that of hundreds of others in the houses nearby, killed by the seeping poisonous gases from the combustion of her creation.  Slowly, over the decades, some of those buildings had been thinly repopulated – they saw curtains draw closed as they made their way down the street, suspicious eyes watching them through slits in faded fabric – but the house on the corner looked much as it had a century earlier, only weathered and damaged still further by the ravages of time.

It was made of stone, and its foundation and roof still stood solid, shielding it from the worst of the elements; but every window was gone, letting the cold air rush through it, peeling the wallpaper and knocking the shattered bits of burnt furniture about, leaving the interior a rubbish heap.  The front door stood half open, its lock long since rusted off, hanging uselessly from its hook; but what did it matter?  Who would break into a cursed house with nothing left to steal?

It had once been beautiful, that Abby could still see.  Its proportions were clean and elegant, Georgian in style, with the wreckage of what might once have been a lovely trellis of climbing vines making its way up the façade.  Now, untended by years, it had swollen to a thick carpet of green that merged with the waist-high overgrown weeds that had overtaken the little garden patch beside the front door, giving her the sinister impression that the earth was rising up slowly to reclaim the building, bit by bit, swallowing it down whole.

She reached out for Marcus’ hand, squeezing it tightly, and with a deep breath they followed Lexa inside.

The house was three floors high; the ground floor, where they entered, held the remains of what had once been a comfortable, spacious kitchen, dining room and parlor.  The stairwell up to the second floor was crumbling away in places, but they made their way gingerly up it to the second floor, where Rebecca’s bedroom, dressing room and sewing room had once been.  The house was not so unlike her own as to allow Abby the ability to traverse its halls unaffected; here she caught sight of a scrap of carpet that reminded her of home, there the broken-off leg of a small table whose delicate detail pleased her.  A woman scientist who had been independent enough to keep her own house, to collect lovely things, and clever enough to discover a new element more powerful than any weapon ever before known to man.  It occurred to her, as they passed down the hall to the narrow doorway whose cramped staircase led to the topmost floor, that Rebecca must have been a remarkable woman for her day.  Abby felt a peculiar emotion at the thought that very probably, she would have liked her.

But that Rebecca was gone.  All they could do for her now was destroy the revenant, and lay her to rest.

The attic stairs opened out into a long, narrow hallway full of burnt, blackened fragments of doors hanging creakily off their hinges.  The servants had lived up here, and from time to time Rebecca took in boarders; all of them had been killed in their beds that night, first to die from the poisoned heat of the blast. 

Rebecca’s laboratory was near the top of the stairs, its own door and windows long since gone.  Almost nothing remained but dust and rubble and a few shards of what might once have been furniture.  The windows gaped in the soot-blackened walls like dead white eyes, turning even the morning sunlight sinister and forbidding.

Here, Lexa had told them, the veil between the living and the dead was thinnest.  Here they would establish their base of operations, to destroy the revenant once and for all.

* * *

It was the work of several hours to prepare the room and make everything ready to begin.  Marcus and Lexa trudged up and down the stairs, hauling furniture from the less-damaged rooms below so Lexa had somewhere to set up her equipment.  Meanwhile Abby, Raven and Clarke took on the task of securing the room against Rebecca’s invasion; they had brought baskets of ivy garland with them, and a bag of silver coins, which ringed the room in a protective circle, passing over the threshold of the door, and around each of the windows.  By the time they paused for something to eat, the sun was high in the noonday sky, and the room had lost some of its shadows, making it feel every so faintly human again.  A long trestle table sat along the wall, onto which Lexa unpacked her myriad boxes of scientific equipment, with assistance from Raven.  A carved wooden chair, with faded, scorched red velvet on the arms and back, sat ready for Clarke beside it, with a few chipped stools nearby for the others. 

It was a mark of how distracted Marcus had been that morning that he had had no notion of the preparations going on in the bedroom down the hall, where Lexa had spent all the hours from dawn until breakfast carefully training Raven in the use of her mechanical devices.  (Just as it was, perhaps, a mark of how focused the girls were that they had not noticed when they finally descended the stairs to the kitchen that Marcus’ bed had not been slept in.)  But the apparatus he watched them assemble on the work table was astonishing in its complexity – a series of burners and beakers, connected by glass tubes, bubbling and flowing with a number of liquids and chemicals he could not possibly identify or name, all of which fed in precisely-calibrated drops into a vial that connected to a long tube made of rubber – which, in turn, connected to a wicked-looking syringe.

Raven, operating the steam-powered dials of the device, was deft and sure, seeming to possess an intuitive grasp of Titus’ complicated equipment; Marcus watched in fascination as she and Lexa worked, Raven carefully monitoring the readings from the dials and scribbling numbers in a notebook, Lexa measuring liquids from a series of small jars and ampoules into the various bubbling beakers.  As they began to drip slowly into the last and largest glass bubble of all, the one which attached to the hose, Marcus watched Lexa retrieve from the bag at her waist the tiny vial she had shown him once before, containing Raven’s black blood.  She poured in three drops, instantly turning the entire solution an angry, poisonous green.

“It looks like witchcraft,” he could not help remarking, and Lexa laughed.

“Yes,” she retorted dryly.  “To the uninitiated, science very often does.”

Then, “Thirty-five point eight,” Raven pronounced, indicating to Lexa the readings on one of the steam-powered dials, which seemed to be some kind of cue.  Clarke took her seat in the chair.  Abby pulled up a rickety wooden stool, scorched about the legs and base but still serviceable, and took a seat beside her daughter, accepting the basin of water and cloth Lexa handed her.  “Keep her forehead and pulse points cool,” she instructed the woman, and Abby nodded.  “The chemical reaction once the solution hits her bloodstream may cause symptoms much like fever.  God willing, we shall not have to keep her in this state for long.”

“I hope you know what you are about,” said Marcus, brow furrowed in concern as he watched Raven very gently tie Clarke’s arms, one by one, to the fraying padded armrests of the chair.  “This seems dreadfully risky.”

“I know what I am about, Marcus.”

He looked pointedly at Clarke.  “It is not too late,” he told her.  “I would trade places with you, if you asked me to.”

“You detest needles,” she reminded him.

“Even so.”

The girl shook her head.  “The house is yours,” she said.  “The deed is in your name.  The travel documents are in your name.  Our money is yours.  Our resources are yours.  If the worst should happen we would have no way out of Paris without you.  And besides,” she added. “I volunteered.”

“I don’t like it,” he said stubbornly.  Abby looked up at him with a soft, knowing smile that caused his heart to turn over inside his chest.

“We’re all going home together,” she said to him in a firm, gentle voice.  “All of us.  I have faith in Dr. Van Helsing, Marcus.  And faith in you, for bringing her to us.  I don’t like it either, but this is the only way.  If we have no idea what we are looking for, our weapons are no good to us.” 

“Ready,” said Raven finally, sitting back and admiring her handiwork.  Lexa stepped in closer, examined it carefully, and nodded with approval. 

“Very good,” she said.  “We are ready to begin.” Clarke nodded and leaned back against the headrest of the chair, closing her eyes, as Raven deftly slipped the gleaming point of the syringe into her skin.  Marcus looked away, watching the slow progression of the strange green liquid as it seeped drop by drop into Clarke’s blood.  “Follow the sign of infinity wherever you see it,” she told the girl.  “If I am right, the sign will lead you.  When you open your eyes, you will be in this room, but on the other side of the spirit realm.  You will be in the shadows of the revenant’s memory.  Search the house top to bottom, and follow the signs.  You will know what you seek when you find it.”

Clarke’s eyes, heavy-lidded, began to droop as she sank back in her chair, and after a few moments, she was unconscious. 

Thus it began.

Time passed slowly.  Clarke was largely still and quiet, with occasional bouts of fidgeting movement or sharp inhalations of breath which Lexa assured them all were entirely normal.  On her left, Abby measured her pulse at regular intervals and dotted her brow with cool water, keeping watch over her breathing, heartbeat and body temperature, alert to the slightest hint of something going wrong.  On her right, Raven kept watch over the brass mechanism measuring the flow of liquid, tending diligently to the machinery and checking from time to time on the steam-powered dials to ensure that all remained in order.

Lexa wandered over from time to time to observe and sometimes speak in a very quiet whisper to Clarke, but she and Marcus largely stayed out of their way.  They spoke little.  Raven had brought a basket with her that had some food and a few flasks of water, but they had little appetite either. 

It was well into late afternoon before Marcus, who had spent much of the day pacing, watching with helpless worry over the mother and daughter seated together by the window, finally realized what the furrow in Lexa’s brow really meant.

He made his way over to the window where she stood gazing out over the streets of Paris.

“It’s taking too long, isn’t it?” he said, and it wasn’t a question.  The girl nodded, unable to look at him.

“There should have been signs,” she said quietly.  “In his notes, he said there would be signs . . . a path of infinity symbols that would lead the seeker to the revenant’s nest.”

“What happens,” he asked her, voice pitched too low to be overheard, “if the revenant’s nest is not here?”

“Then the only way to destroy the final talisman is to remove it from around her neck,” said Lexa helplessly.  “A thing none of us could possibly get close enough to do.”

“Good God,” Marcus whispered, horror in his voice.  “We would have to _summon_ her.”

She nodded again.  “But Rebecca could not pass over the boundary into this room,” she pointed out, “and none of us would be safe from her clutches if we stepped outside it.  Remember, her powers are so strong that even Abby’s silver ring did not protect her on its own; she was convinced through mind control to remove it.  None of us can leave this room until she is dead, which means we will never get close enough to take the necklace.”

“Can we destroy it without removing it?” he asked suddenly, struck with an idea.

“What do you mean?”

“Contact with the chemical Becca created, even the tiniest droplet, was enough to destroy the others,” he reminded her.  “If we found a way to, I don’t know, to _douse_ her somehow – “

“Lure her to us and pour a bucket of water over her head?” Lexa asked dubiously.  “She isn’t a cat, Marcus.”

“In her corporeal form,” he said insistently, the pieces beginning to fit together in his head, “she moves like a person, does she not?  With all the limits a mortal body has.  She cannot cross the Channel without a boat.  She cannot travel through a city without a carriage.  And she cannot reach the top of a three-story house without . . .”

“The stairs,” Lexa breathed, realizing.  He nodded, excitement building inside his chest.

_This could work._

This could truly work.

“A rope and a winch,” he said.  “And a bucket, or something with a handle we could tie off.  We would never have to leave the ivy circle, we could do it from here.”

“And we could do it without wasting a drop from that vial,” she said.  “In case we need it later.  We have a far more potent weapon at our disposal.”

“What is it?”

“The _house,”_ she told him triumphantly.  “And everything in it.  Do you remember the destructive effect of merely one drop of Rebecca’s chemical?  Well, this house is a thousand times more powerful.  Her own humanity, the memory of the real woman she was and the real death she died - those are our best weapons against her.  Contact with anything in this house Rebecca ever touched in life – wallpaper, dust, pieces of furniture – should cause the _neb ankh_ to combust altogether, whether she wears it or not.” 

She looked over at Clarke, watching her for a long moment.  “If we increased the dosage,” she murmured, more to herself than to Marcus, “if we doubled the amount of black blood in the final solution . . . it might allow her to lure Rebecca to us.  She might, perhaps, have the ability to make contact.”

“That sounds dangerous.”

“It is,” Lexa allowed.  “But it is also the only way.  If we let Rebecca see through Clarke’s eyes . . . if she realizes we have invaded her home, sees what we allow her to see of our plan – she would be unable to resist coming here to attempt to thwart us.  If we cannot find her nest, if we cannot go to her, then we must summon her to us.”

He nodded.  “Tell Abby,” he said.  “I’ll go hunt for rope and supplies, while we still have the daylight to keep us safe.  You stay here with them.”  And with that he stepped over the boundary of ivy and made his way back down the stairs, in search of anything with which to build a trap.

With a somber expression in her dark eyes, Lexa watched him go.

* * *

 It took the better part of an hour for Marcus and Lexa to rig up their trap at the top of the steps, collecting every loose scrap of wood, every peeling strip of wallpaper, every fragment of burned carpet – in short, every piece of the house which was not nailed down – and dump them into a dented tin fire bucket Marcus had found in the cellar.  Just to be sure, Lexa sprinkled the bucket’s dusty contents with a solution of water mixed with another drop of the terrible chemical which had caused such destruction to this ruin of a building nearly a century before.  Then it was finished, and she stepped back to dust off her hands as Marcus rigged the rope and winch (stolen from the ornate, decorative well in the back garden) around a hook he had nailed into the ceiling at the top of the stairs, passing it through the handle of the bucket and hoisting it above the stairwell doorway, out of sight.

“That is that, then,” said Marcus, stepping back inside and handing the long end of the rope to Lexa.  “If we can lure her inside, and up the stairs to us, all of this will be over in a matter of moments.”

There was a pause, so faint he almost failed to notice it.  But when he looked at her she busied herself rather unnecessarily with the business of tying off the rope to the protruding fragment of a brass wall sconce near the inside of their door.

“Yes,” she finally said.  “All over.”  But there was the ghost of a waver in her voice and he observed that she seemed, for the first time, faintly unsure of herself.

“Lexa,” he said gently, and she finally turned around.  “Tell me.”

She hesitated, looking over at the chair where Clarke sat, tended by Abby and Raven.  He understood her unspoken concern – she had something on her mind which she thought, perhaps, might worry them unduly – and drew back towards the far corner of the room, out of earshot.  Lexa followed.

“Your plan is a good one,” she began.  “The only one, in fact.  I cannot think of a better.  All Titus’ notes, all my studies, all my plans, presupposed the ability to locate Rebecca’s nest somewhere in this building if only the proper solution could be administered to someone in a dream state who had never been kissed by the revenant before.  Without that, I am at a loss.  I concede that yours is the plan with the highest possibility of success.”

“But?”

“But there is a danger,” she began slowly.  “A faint one only, mind you, so I have not liked to mention it until now.  But the fact is that I do not know – nor did Titus – whether destroying the final _neb ankh_ would kill only her corporeal form, or her consciousness as well.  If we had found the nest, it would not matter; we could wall it off with silver and ivy to prevent her escape while we destroyed the object and obliterated all traces of it.  But we cannot do that here.  We cannot lure her into crossing a line of silver, where her consciousness will be trapped.  And so, if we destroy the infinity necklace and kill her corporeal form, but leave the revenant’s consciousness unbound, able to fly free . . .”

“Oh no,” he breathed in horror, and she nodded grimly.

“Yes,” she said.  “There is a possibility the revenant could slip through our fingers, disappearing unseen to attach itself to the first unprotected human body it finds.  And it may travel from one to another as quickly as it pleases.  If she escaped into the Paris streets we should never find her again, no matter how many years we searched.”

“Then we break the circle,” he suggested.  “Just for a moment.  We make a circle in the hall, and one of us stands inside it.  Break it, let her come to us.  Raven fought, when she was possessed by Rebecca.  Abby fought.  They remembered who they were.  Especially right at the beginning. One of us could take her inside us, and close the circle, and she would be trapped.  You could do whatever needed to be done.”

Lexa shook her head.  “She would not merely control a limited portion of Abby’s mind, Marcus. She would _become_ her.  The Abby and the Rebecca selves inside her would merge, perhaps permanently.  This would not be like before, when she was tethered to the revenant’s corporeal form.  This would mean the full strength of her consciousness absorbed into a mortal body.  And it would be a death sentence, Marcus.  There is only one way to destroy a human consciousness.  The host body would have to die.”

He stared at her in horror, the reality of her words beginning to sink in. “This is supposition only,” she hastened to reassure him.  “Titus was not sure.  No one else has ever come this close to her before.  It has been known to occur before, in lesser, weaker demons of her ilk, though their consciousnesses were easily destroyed.  But Rebecca is . . . unique.  Powerful.  Even without her talismans.  I believe, all things considered, it is better to be prepared.”

“Prepared, for what?” he snapped, fear making him short-tempered and impatient.  “If what you say is true, if we kill only her body and free her consciousness, then how is she to be defeated at all?  For God’s sake, Lexa, if you’re right, we will only have made the danger _worse.”_

Lexa looked over her shoulder to Clarke, then back to Marcus.  “This,” she said, in a dark and forbidding voice, “is the task she volunteered for.”

“To fight Rebecca inside her dream state?” he whispered, aghast.  “Alone? With no experience, no idea what she is doing?  One girl against the most powerful revenant the world has ever known?”

“If you have a better solution,” she said evenly, “I would be happy to entertain it.  If you do not,” she added, pulling a hip flask out of the pocket of her wool skirt, “I suggest we sit down to wait.”

* * *

Raven’s precise calculations, executed under Lexa’s supervision, deepened Clarke’s trance slowly, bit by bit, the chemical solution easing into her bloodstream and drawing the veil between her mind and the revenant’s thinner and thinner – until, they hoped and prayed, a rift appeared for the revenant to enter Clarke’s mind while Clarke entered hers.

They waited, and waited, fear making all of them tense and skittish, jumping out of their skins at the slightest sound.

The room was foreboding even in broad daylight – scorched and blackened walls, peeling paper, crumbling plaster – and only became more sinister as the sun sank down behind the skyline of Paris and vanished from sight.

It happened very quickly, after that.

Lexa had only time to light the lamps and give her machinery one more cursory check before Clarke startled the life out of all of them, sitting bolt upright in her chair and uttering in a low, haunted whisper, “Rebecca.”

All eyes turned to the open doorway, Lexa assuming her position behind the door with the rope, ready to strike. 

But no one appeared.

“Drop the rope, Lexa Van Helsing,” said Clarke, in a curiously flat voice that was not her own.  “The girl and her mother will be displeased with the consequences if you do not.”

“What does she mean?” asked Abby, looking in fright from her daughter to Lexa and back again.  Lexa, hesitating, stepped away from the door and made her way to the window behind Clarke’s chair, then turned back to Abby.

“I think you’d better go look,” she said grimly.  “Marcus too.”

Abby rose from her chair and went to the window, Marcus close at her side, and they both stopped short, frozen in horror at the macabre tableau spread out below them.

Bellamy, Octavia, Lincoln, Jackson, Maya, Monroe, Indra and both the Millers, father and son, stood frozen still in the street below them, lit by the streetlamps, a pool of something dark and viscous and glistening shining in the streets below their feet. 

Marcus could smell it from two stories up.  “Kerosene,” he said numbly to Abby.  “One spark and they’ll go up in smoke like burning paper.”

“For God’s sake, all of you, what are you doing?” Abby called to them desperately.  “Run!  Get away from here, run!”

But nobody moved.

“They can’t hear you, Abby,” called Jackson in a gentle voice that sounded almost apologetic, as he pulled a small white box of matches out of his pocket.

“No!” Abby screamed.  “Jackson, no, don’t!”

“Follow my directions, and your people shall leave here unharmed,” said Clarke’s dull, emotionless voice.  “First, remove your foolish contraption from the top of the stairs."

Abby looked at Lexa, desperation in her eyes.  After a long moment, the girl nodded and obeyed, tugging roughly at the rope until the bucket’s contents spilled loose all over the hallway floor outside, leaving their makeshift weapon useless.

“Very good,” said Clarke’s voice.  “Next, you will return to me what you have stolen, Lexa Van Helsing.  That glass bottle is mine.”

Marcus and Lexa looked at each other in desperation.

“Without her chemical – “ Lexa began.

“I know.”

“It’s the only weapon I’m certain will destroy the neb _ankh_ and her corporeal form,” she said.  “We cannot lose it.”

“But if we don’t, she will have no hesitation in killing all those innocent people,” Marcus told her heavily.  “She will do it in a heartbeat, you know she will.”

“I fear she will, yes.”

“So what do we do?”

Lexa was silent.

“Lexa,” he pressed again.  “What do we _do?”_

“I don’t know!” she snapped back, her voice a harsh whisper, and it was the first time he realized that Lexa was afraid.

Her perfectly-calibrated plan had crumbled, lives were at stake, and she was out of ideas.  They had eclipsed everything she knew and everything she had learned from Titus and had come to the end of the road, with the choice to either give up their only sure weapon or watch people they loved burn to death in front of them, with no way to stop it.

He looked over at Clarke, unconscious in her chair, and saw for the first time that her left hand – lying palm up on the heavy armrest – was clutched around something.

Abby had wrapped her daughter’s fingers around Jacob Griffin’s silver pocketwatch.

And suddenly, Marcus knew.

He knew why the hallway of the burnt-out attic had struck him as so sinister, and he knew what the dream had meant, and he knew – or at least, he hoped he knew – how to kill Rebecca.

“The ivy,” he said to her.  “The circle of ivy and circle around the perimeter of the room.”

“What about it?”

“It is impenetrable, is it not?  I don’t mean only by Rebecca.  I mean if her consciousness took on a human body, that human could not cross the boundary either.  Everyone inside would still be safe.” His voice was urgent, but held the hint of a question in it.  Lexa nodded, puzzled, making her way across the room towards him, an expression of concern in her eyes.  “And once she takes on a human host, and the revenant and the human merge, killing the human destroys her as well.  Does it not?”

“Marcus – “

“So if it were done quickly,” he insisted, “while the revenant was disoriented – I mean if the person died right away – the circle would protect everyone inside it.  You could keep them safe.  No matter what happens, Rebecca could not harm anyone inside this room.”

“Marcus, what are you – “

“Swear it,” he demanded, voice suddenly rough and insistent, threaded through with something rather desperate that Lexa did not like.

“Marcus –“

“Can you do it?” he demanded.  “Can you keep them safe?”

Lexa looked over towards the burnt, broken armchair where Clarke sat, eyes closed, her mother on one side of her and Raven on the other, holding her hands and murmuring softly to her.  Marcus followed her eyes, and they watched in silence for a moment, until Abby stroked her daughter’s hair back from her forehead, and Marcus suddenly could not look at them anymore. “Neither the revenant nor anyone under her control can step past this line,” he murmured again, in a dark voice.  “You swear it.”

“I swear it, Marcus,” she said, baffled, “but what on earth – “

“She thinks love is weakness, you told us,” he said urgently.  “She cannot understand it.  She cannot comprehend how a human being would sacrifice themselves or choose pain and suffering to protect someone they love.”

“Yes.”

“Then if I am lucky,” he said grimly, “she will not see this coming.” 

“See what coming?”

“We were married last night,” he said in a low voice.  “We married ourselves.  We said vows.  We exchanged tokens.”

“Marcus – “

“She has my mother’s silver rosary,” he told Lexa.  “My mother loved Abby like her own.  My mother will keep her safe.”  He reached down into the collar of his white shirt and tugged free the silver chain with Jacob Griffin’s wedding ring.  “He spoke to me in a dream last night,” he murmured.  “He gave me the only way to keep his daughter safe.  He told me exactly what to do.”

He gave one last look back at Abby, who was murmuring quietly to her daughter and did not look up.  “If it does not work the way I think it will,” he told Lexa, “there is a revolver in my satchel.  Only make it quick.”

And then she knew.

“You idiot,” she exclaimed, fury and astonishment mingling in her eyes as he snapped the silver chain, dropped Jacob’s wedding ring onto the floor, and stepped over the circle of ivy out into the hallway.  “Marcus, get _back_!” she hissed, but it was too late.  The hush was broken, suddenly and sharply, by the sinister swish and rustle of red silk skirts and a pair of light footsteps making their slow, deliberate way up the stair.

“Quick and clean, between the eyes,” he advised her.  “Don't aim for my chest, too much room for error.  A shot to the head is messier, for which I apologize, but if you've good aim and a keen eye it's a far surer bet to kill someone quickly."

"Don't you _dare."_

"Keep them safe, no matter what happens," he said, ignoring her protests. "Take care of them for me.  And for God’s sake, no matter what I do or say, _don’t let me back inside_.”

“Get back inside, you damned fool, don’t do this!” she barked at him, voice cold with fury. 

“Get the revolver, Lexa,” he ordered her, raising his hands in a gesture of surrender and turning to face the oncoming footsteps sounding in the stairwell. _“Now.”_

The footsteps grew louder, the silken swish of skirts grew closer, a figure moving in the shadows towards into the halo of light outside their doorway, lit with the incandescent greenish glow of the lanterns Lexa had set up around the room.

“You are either very clever or very foolish, Marcus Kane,” a silvery voice rang out in the darkness.  “Dr. Van Helsing appears to think you have been a fool.  It remains to be seen whether this observation is correct.”

“Marcus!” Clarke cried out suddenly, her voice her own again, startling Raven and Abby so violently they nearly jolted out of their seats.  “Marcus, no!”

But it was too late.

As Raven and Abby turned in horror, they joined Lexa and Marcus in watching the all-too-familiar figure of Rebecca sweep up the final stair and stand in their doorway, illuminated with wavering greenish light.

She seemed faded around the edges somehow – glossy black hair duller, scarlet dress dimmed.  But her eyes were as piercing as ever. And there, around her throat, the silver necklace shone as brightly as it ever had, taunting them, just out of reach.

“Hello, Rebecca,” Marcus said, voice even and calm.

“Marcus, what are you doing?” Abby cried out.  “Get back inside!” She moved as if to go to him, but was arrested by a sharp gasp from Clarke, who appeared to be having a particularly violent reaction to the revenant’s proximity.

“Abby, her fever,” murmured Raven.  “We need the water basin.  Cool her down.  Now.”

“But Marcus – “

“Has made a choice,” Raven finished for her.  “All we can do is take care of Clarke and hope to God he has a plan.”

Abby swallowed hard, nodded, and returned to Clarke’s side, swabbing her flushed forehead and wrists with cold water, running her fingertips over the surface of the silver pocketwatch clutched in her daughter’s hand.

 _I know he took the ring off,_ she murmured silently to Jacob, wherever he was.  _But protect him anyway.  Please.  If you can.  Keep him safe._

Rebecca approached Marcus, tilting her head curiously to the side in that inhuman, almost birdlike manner, regarding him thoughtfully.

“I detect a strong emotion in you, Marcus Kane,” she said.  “I believe it to be fear.”

He held up his hands.  “I surrender,” he said to Rebecca.  “The others will not.  Dr. Van Helsing has convinced them she has a plan which can defeat you, once and for all.  But you have bested us at every turn.  We have nothing left.  And so I yield.  I do not wish to die.  You have power.  You are immortal.  And if you take me as your own, take my strength as your strength, we shall both become immortal.  Is that not so?”

“That is so,” said Rebecca crisply.  “I can make you one like me.  You would be exceedingly useful.”

“Then make use of me.  It is as you said.  Human beings do not desire pain.  I surrender, in the hopes that when you destroy the others, you may spare me.”

Rebecca moved closer to him, brushing cold white fingers over his cheek and looking deeply into his eyes.  “You are lying to me, Marcus Kane,” she told him, in a cool toneless voice that made the others shiver.  “I do not believe that you are afraid of me at all.”  She took his face between her pale hands, caressing his jaw with her thumbs in a gesture so intimate that Abby, watching in desperation from her seat beside Clarke, looked away, feeling suddenly sick.  “But power, yes,” she said.  “That was not a falsehood.  You are a man who has often felt powerless.  This I already know.  A man who has wanted things he could not have.  Remember, I shared all the memories and thoughts which belonged to Thelonious Jaha.  I know a great many things about you.  I know that you have loved Abby Griffin all your life and that you left the country to forget her.  That was weakness.”

“Yes,” agreed Marcus.  “It was.  I was weak.”

“Marcus, don’t,” Abby pleaded with him.  “Don’t.”  She moved as if to rise from her seat again, but Raven seized her wrist and pulled her back down. 

“Clarke needs us,” she cautioned her.  “I’m so sorry, Abby.  But Marcus is on his own now.  You can’t go to him while Clarke’s mind is still open to the revenant.  Trust him.  Trust that he has a plan.”

“The others do not believe you,” Rebecca observed from the doorway, watching Raven whisper to Abby.  “They believe you are attempting to deceive me.  This is the logical conclusion.”

“They know only what I have chosen to show them.  They do not see what lies within, the way you do.”

“Even Abby?”

“Especially Abby.”

“Yet you love her.”

“Love cannot prevent death,” he said calmly.  “It cannot end human suffering.” 

“And so you will leave them behind, to fend for themselves?” asked Rebecca.  “You will leave them at my mercy, trapped forever in this room or risking death if they step outside it?”

“I cannot save all of them,” he said.  “I can save only myself.  It is the logical choice.”

“You are correct,” said Rebecca, her voice sounding faintly pleased, as though he were a student who had given the right answer to a question.  “There is a twelve percent chance of all five of you surviving.  Your deaths will be painful.  You wish to avoid this fate.”

“At all costs,” said Marcus, something grim and determined in his voice, and that was when it happened.

 _I hope you were right, Jacob,_ he prayed silently, closing his eyes.  _Please be with me.  Please be right.  And please, please, let the fire at least make it quick.  Spare Lexa from having to use the gun, if you can.  Let the fire take me, and all of this will be over.  Help me keep the woman we love safe._

Then he bent his head, still cupped in the revenant’s cold white hands, and kissed her poisonous red lips, causing all three of the women watching to scream his name in horror. 

But only Lexa was near enough to see what happened next. 

Only Lexa saw his hand fly with lightning quickness to the back of Rebecca’s neck, give a harsh, swift tug and pull the infinity necklace free, flinging it violently to the floor.

The scream was deafening, a hundred times worse than what they had experienced destroying the _neb ankh_ retrieved from the mayor’s house, and the blinding flash of green light flared into a roaring inferno whose force blasted Lexa back into the doorway, clinging on for dear life.  Abby dropped to her knees, arms protectively wrapped around her daughter to shield her. 

None of them knew how long it endured – it could have been hours or seconds, they did not know – but by the time the smoke cleared, there was nothing left of the woman in red but a scorched black circle on the floor.

Marcus, it turned out, had miscalculated.

The fire did not kill him.  It was only fatal to the revenant, not to him; but it did knock him to the ground with the force of the blast. After checking to ensure that Clarke was all right, Abby left her with Raven and raced to the door, intending to go to his side. 

But Lexa held her back.  “Not yet,” she said.  “It may not be over.”

“But we destroyed the necklace,” she said, puzzled.  “The final _neb ankh_.  The last talisman.  You told us -“

“I know,” said Lexa.  “I know.  But wait.  Just for a moment, until we see if he is himself again.”

“What do you mean, ‘himself?’”

“Abby,” Marcus whispered, slowly coming to on the floor.  “Abby.”

“Marcus!” she cried.  “Oh, thank God.”

He levered himself slowly, heavily back to his feet, burnt plaster dust from the hallway explosion powdering his dark suit and hair, and dusted himself off, stretching a little and shifting his weight to determine whether or not he was hurt.

“I’m all right,” he said, answering her unspoken question.  “I’m all right, love.  We did it.  It’s over.”

“Oh, thank God,” she whispered, and he smiled.

“It’s over,” he repeated, opening his arms to her.  “Come to me, love.  Come here.  It’s all right.  It’s over.”

Abby moved towards him, but Lexa gripped her wrist with astonishing strength, yanking her backwards before she could take a step over the green ivy boundary.

“You come to us,” she said evenly to Marcus. 

Abby stared at her. “Lexa, it’s _Marcus_ ,” she said.  “The revenant is gone.  Everything is all right now.”

“Then let him come to us,” she repeated.  “If Marcus is Marcus, he will prove it and cross over the ivy to come back inside.”

“Oh, for God’s sake, Lexa,” Marcus sighed, exasperated.  “Can a man not kiss his wife in the hall with a bit of privacy without being suspected of having turned into a devil?”

“Really Lexa,” Abby agreed, “he is quite right.  Look, he is the same Marcus he always was.  Nothing at all is amiss.  You worry too much.”

Lexa did not let go of her arm, and did not take her eyes off Marcus, standing in the hallway with a baffled, almost wounded expression on his face.

“Have it your way,” he said finally.  “I will come in, if you insist.”

Lexa said nothing.

“Oh, for heaven’s sake,” Abby began, “this is becoming absurd.  Marcus, will you just – “

“Stop!” called Raven, startling everyone in the room into silence.  Abby and Lexa turned around.  “Abby, don’t,” she said, eyes wide and wild.  “Don’t invite him in.”

“What has gotten into everyone?” Abby demanded.

“She's here,” said Raven desperately.  “She’s still here somewhere.  I can feel her.”

“Raven – “

“Stand back,” she commanded Abby.  “Stand back from the door, and don’t invite him in.  Don't say the words.  If it’s Marcus, the ivy will not stop him.”

“Abby,” Marcus murmured in a low voice, stretching out his hand.  “Abby.  Take my hand.  Trust me.”

“Stand _back_ , Abby,” called Raven, as Lexa pulled her away from the door, and finally she relented.

They stepped back into the center of the room, and watched through the doorway as Marcus stood stock still, staring at them with a sad expression on his face.  The stalemate lasted a long time.

Then the terrible thing happened.

“You should have told them, Lexa Van Helsing,” said Marcus, tilting his head to the side as he looked at her, the horrifying familiar gesture making their blood run cold.  “Your pride got the better of you.”

“Marcus?” Abby whispered in a small voice, staring at him with wide eyes. 

Lexa shook her head. “He sacrificed himself in order to destroy the necklace,” she said in a quiet voice.  “But he stepped out of the circle of protection, allowing Rebecca to possess him completely.  He thought the fire would kill him, taking the revenant's consciousness with him.  But it did not.”

“You are not as clever as you believe yourself to be, Lexa Van Helsing,” said the Marcus who was not Marcus, “and neither was your master.  I will admit that you have been a significant inconvenience, but unless you decide to kill Marcus Kane – which I doubt you shall – you have made no further progress.  Not to mention that you have given me access to his memories and all his knowledge.”  He looked over Lexa’s shoulder at the chair where Clarke sat, Raven crouched protectively by her side.  “That was clever,” he acknowledged.  “Protected lucid dreaming.  You have an unusually adept mind, Lexa Van Helsing.  However, the girl lives in a fragile mortal body, and if she dies, your experiment is over.”

“She is safe within this room from you,” said Lexa.

“Perhaps,” he conceded.  “But she is still mortal.  There are ways.”  And with that, he disappeared down the hallway, out of sight.  Perplexed, frightened, Abby watched him go.

“Go prepare a second vial of the black blood,” Lexa ordered her, brooking no argument.

“A second?” asked Abby.  “For who?”

“For me,” said Lexa grimly.  “Clarke will need my assistance.  We have managed, rather successfully, to distract the revenant, but we no longer have as much time as we thought we had.”

“Why?” asked Abby, cold horror dawning in her voice.  “Where has Marcus gone?  Where has she taken him?”

A heavy, dull cracking sound above them answered the question before Lexa could.

“The roof,” said Lexa.  “We sealed off the doors and windows with ivy, so Rebecca cannot get into this room.  But Marcus is stronger than she is, and no longer capable of feeling pain.  She will use his body as a battering ram to break through the ceiling to get to Clarke unless I can navigate her through the dream world, to find and destroy the revenant before Marcus kills us all.”

“It’s not just Marcus,” Raven called over to them from her post by Clarke’s side as they hastened back.  “I saw shapes moving up the outside wall, around the window.”

Abby rushed over to peer out, heart sinking, as the white-clad shape of little Maya – pulled from wherever Rebecca had found her in her nightdress and slippers – smiled merrily at Abby as she climbed hand over hand up the rough jagged stone of the building, following Marcus to the roof.

Lexa pulled up another chair beside Clarke and let Raven tie her down.  “Hurry,” she said.  “We have no time left to lose.  If they break through the roof, we all die, and they die too.  And there will be no one left in the world to stop Rebecca then.”

“Ready,” said Raven, hastily tying off the makeshift second rubber hose to filter the green fluid into Lexa’s arm, as Abby pulled her chair around to reach both the girls’ wrists to monitor their pulse.

“I’m coming, Clarke,” said Lexa softly.  Then she leaned her head back and closed her eyes.


	11. The Girl In the Blue Dress

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello and welcome to the last chapter of this fic I've been working on since October that was supposed to be done by Halloween and it's now Easter, OOPS
> 
> A few quick disclaimers:
> 
> 1) this chapter is about 13,000 words long, there was a lot of plot to wrap up, I AM SO SORRY, this is why it took me like 5 months to finish
> 
> 2) while obviously all our core squad makes it out okay, there are five deaths in this chapter. one is a murder, two are suicides, and two are dogs killed by accident. please be mindful if those are things that are triggering for you. they're all definitely sad, though none of them are gruesome. without giving any spoilers, I did not kill anyone who isn't dead in canon (omg also not counting Lexa, duh, LEXA IS FINE)
> 
> 3) speaking of which, while I remain not really a Clexa shipper in canon, this is a gift fic for my friend Nicole who loves Clexa with her whole heart, and HOO BOY did this final chapter become unexpectedly endgame Clexa AF (I may be aggressively in love with AU Lexa van Helsing tbh) so if that's not for you, just a heads-up. I hesitate to tag this fic as Clexa, because it's really a Kabby fic, and I know how annoying it is to see something new in your ship tag and be like "WHEEEEE NEW FIC!" and then your ship has like three lines. but anyway just like. FYI. this chapter's super gay. 
> 
> 4) sorry again for making you all wait literally five months for this goddamn fic to end I APPRECIATE YOUR PATIENCE AND THAT NONE OF YOUR "WHEN IS THE LAST CHAPTER GOING UP?" MESSAGES WERE EVER BITCHY, YOU ARE ALL ANGELS FOR PUTTING UP WITH ME

** **

  **CLARKE**

Coffee.

She cannot yet force her eyes to open, heavy and dull-lidded with sleep, though the fog is beginning to clear.  The world around her is a thick sort of greenish darkness, with distant lights flickering inside it, too far away to see.  But the achingly familiar aroma slices cleanly through it, anchoring her to a world she knows.  (“Your senses will be unusually heightened,” Lexa had said.)  Nothing inside the lucid dream state is real, but it _feels_ real, and this is a thing she understands ( _cream and sugar for her, black with two sugars for Mother, served in blue china cups from the steaming silver coffee pot Great-Aunt Eleanor gave Mother for her wedding_ ), so she permits it to wrap her up in its arms and pull her into the light.

Black coffee, rich and dark, the bitter scent softened at the edges by the competing aroma of sweet things baking.  Madeleines, perhaps.  And a delicate ribbon of violin music fluttering beneath the deafening, happy clamor of chattering voices. 

None of them belong to Lexa, or Uncle Marcus, or Mother . . . which means that, wherever Lexa's experiment has taken her, Clarke is somewhere else entirely.

She opens her eyes, and finds Rebecca’s house gone without a trace.

She is standing, quite improbably, in the middle of a Paris café.

_What in the world . . .  
_

Lexa has been honest with her about the risks, about her own inexperience with putting anyone besides herself into a lucid dream state, but Clarke knows a few things.  She knows that no matter where she is (or _when_ she is, she realizes abruptly, noting the antique clothing), the world unfolding before her will somehow lead her to the silver infinity necklace.

Wherever she is, she is inside Rebecca’s past.

Wherever she is, the map to the revenant’s nest is here.

She takes in her surroundings.  Something feels _wrong,_ immediately, something in this world is out of joint, but she fails to place it.  It taunts her from a distance, just out of reach, just on the tip of her tongue.  But aside from the fact that she oughtn't to be here, it appears to be a perfectly ordinary, even lovely, place.  Ornate wrought-iron tables with little marble tops, steaming silver carafes along the high counter, trays of confections and _patisserie_ displayed like jewels in a glass case beside them.  It is midday, bright springtime sun pouring in through the windows which stand open to the cobblestone plaza outside.  The crowd inside the café consists almost entirely of men, clothed the way she remembers men used to look in her history books about the French Revolution. 

But over in one corner, away from the light, at the very furthest table from the windows and door, a girl in a blue dress sits alone.

“Follow the sign of infinity,” Lexa instructed her.  Titus’ notes on this were vague, at best, but his protégée is certain that the path to the revenant’s nest will be marked by the creature’s sigil.  Well, there is no sigil to be seen, which is a bit of a setback, but there is also one person in this room as out-of-place as she is.  Clarke has never seen the girl in the blue dress before, but Clarke is clever, and if there are clues to be found, one might as well begin with the thing that fails to fit the pattern.

She makes her careful way between clusters of men drinking coffee and shouting in French, before the truth finally dawns on her, and that peculiar feeling of _wrongness_ becomes suddenly clear. _  
_

_No one in the café can see her._

She knocks ever so slightly into a chair - once by mistake, and then again deliberately, just to see - but the chair does not move and its inhabitant does not look up.  A waiter carrying a stack of plates brushes past her without even flinching.  Not a single face looks up as she passes by.

The world feels so real to her – solid, corporeal – but she, it seems, does not feel real to it.

 _Well, in for a penny,_ thinks Clarke with a sigh, and sits down at the girl's table.

As she settles in against the red velvet banquette across the small round marble tabletop from the girl in the blue dress, she half-expects the glossy dark head to lift up sharply at the unexpected disturbance.  But the girl cannot see her any more than the waiters could, so Clarke merely sits and watches her drink her coffee, wondering what will happen next.

The girl is nervous, that much is clear.  Waiting for someone, perhaps, or afraid of being seen.  Perhaps both.  She is small and slim and very pretty, with shining black hair and warm olive skin.  Her eyes are rich and brown beneath delicate spectacles, flashing with both intelligence and warmth.  The velvet banquette is a half-moon shape, with the girl in the blue dress at its farthest end, where she can discreetly scan the room as she nibbles absently at her cake. So when the man arrives, she sees him first, rising so swiftly from her seat that the abrupt movement, after so long a period of frozen stillness, startles the life out of Clarke.

The man is tall and sturdy, with military bearing, and he greets the girl with a hearty handshake that marks him as English even before he has opened his mouth.  "Commander McAdams," says the girl in a lilting French accent, voice pitched low to avoid being overheard.  "Oh, thank God you have come."

The man kisses her cheek and takes a seat across from her, so close to Clarke that she is forced to shift away to prevent him from treading on the hem of her skirts (and finding herself, in a rather unsettling manner, now trapped between two people who cannot see her at all).  "I left the moment I got your letter.  Not a moment to lose.  How is she?"

The girl’s shoulders sink, as though under a physical weight.  “She is like a madwoman.  We can no longer even keep servants, she frightens them all away within a week.  They believe she is possessed by a devil.  Or perhaps that she is a witch.  It has fallen to me to keep the house, so that we both at least may eat and wear clean clothes.”

“How the devil do you have the time to serve as her bloody housekeeper?  Unconscionable.  She needs you in the laboratory.”

The girl shakes her head.  “No one is permitted in the laboratory anymore.  I leave her meals on a tray outside.  She has had a mattress brought in, and now she sleeps there.”

He stares at her in something like astonishment, regarding her with searching, concerned eyes.  “She sleeps in the laboratory?” he repeats, baffled, proper English decorum at war with his profound concern and curiosity.  “She no longer – “

“No,” says the girl swiftly, cutting him off, eyes bright with tears.  Nothing more is said between them about it, but Clarke already knows the end of his question.

_She sleeps in the laboratory.  She no longer sleeps beside you._

It is not merely fear which brings such shadows into the pretty girl’s dark eyes, but heartbreak, too.

“She no longer answers my letters, Miss Gordon,” says Commander McAdams, with a gesture of frustrated resignation.  “I’ve long since lost the ability to reason with her."

The girl smiles at him a little sadly.  "I think under such circumstances, we may as well use Christian names," she replies with a weak, mirthless laugh.  "I should feel less like I am plotting a conspiracy and more like I am conversing with an old friend if you would call me Peri."

"Peri," he says, trying it out, as though he has never said it before, and it cements the name in Clarke's memory too.  "Then you may call me Cole.  And we are two old friends drinking coffee together, nothing unseemly or dangerous about it at all.  Nothing to be afraid of."

"Nothing to be afraid of _here_ ," she corrects him quietly, looking away, and he gives a grim nod.

"I confess I have not arrived with anything resembling a plan," he admits.  "But somehow, she must be stopped.”

“I am doing all I can.  I simply do not know what else to do.”

“What is it, this peculiar compound she believes she has discovered?”

Peri sets down her coffee cup, hands trembling too violently to hold it, as a shudder of something like revulsion rips through her body.  “She has not yet given it a name, but she has told me a little of what it can do.  One drop could level an entire building, she says.  The most powerful weapon known to man.”

Cole stares at her, appalled.  “Good God!  She has been building a _weapon_ all this time?”

“She thinks she is doing good.  Properly harnessed, a vial smaller than this sugar bowl could power an entire factory for five years.  No more coal, no more horses.  A revolution, she says.  And no blood spilled this time.  She could end the Reign of Terror, she could unify the nation.  She could make France the most powerful country on earth.”

“Or she could destroy us all,” said the commander darkly, “should a chemical of such staggering potency fall even once into the wrong hands.”

“It already has.  Someone so fanatically, single-mindedly devoted to saving the world could destroy it by mistake just as easily.  But she has lost the ability to listen to reason.”

“She is Icarus,” Cole observes sadly.  “She believes herself one of the gods.  She has flown too high and when she falls, she could bring all of us down with her.”

They sit in silence for a moment after this, all three of them lost in very different thoughts.  Peri lifts a bite of cake to her mouth, then sets the fork down, untasted.  Commander McAdams toys with the hem of a silk napkin on the other side of the table, distracted.  Clarke watches them both, mind in a whirl, pieces of the truth beginning to click together inside her head like the gears of a watch.

“The hounds are dead,” Peri says abruptly, breaking the silence with quiet devastation in her voice.  It is such an odd non sequitur that for a moment Clarke wonders perhaps if Peri is speaking in cipher; but the words clearly mean something to her friend, whose eyes go wide with horror.

"No," he breathes in a stunned whisper.  "No.  She loved them so dearly.  Tell me it isn't so.  Tell me she is not _that_ far gone."

"Not malice," Peri corrects him, swallowing hard to steel back tears.  "More like . . . the first casualties of zealotry."

"My poor girl."

"It was two weeks ago," Peri goes on, attempting rather desperately to maintain her composure. “The compound is unstable, and reacts badly when exposed to concentrated hydrogen.  The hounds were sleeping at her feet, in the laboratory, while she worked.  She would not admit my company, but the animals seemed to calm her somewhat, and I believed she enjoyed keeping them close by.  She spends most of her days attempting to distill her new chemical down into a more and more concentrated state.  One of the glass pipes in her apparatus was fractured, too small to see but enough to permit two compounds to mix.  She wore a mask to cover her mouth and nose while working,” the girl tells him, voice shaking with something Clarke recognizes as fury mixed with grief, “to protect herself.  But she forgot about the hounds.  By the time she had opened the window and cleared the room of toxic vapor, both of them were dead.”  She closed her eyes, tears shining on her dark lashes.  “They slept at my feet every night since I was thirteen years old,” she tells him, and he places a strong, heavy hand over her own.

“You did right to call for my help,” says Cole gently.  “We will find a way, Peri.  We will save her from herself.  We will save the city from her.  We will do what must be done.”

“I love her,” the girl says softly, though to both Cole and to Clarke, the words are by this point entirely unnecessary.  The truth has been written across her face from the beginning.  “I love her, but I no longer recognize her.”

“We will do what must be done,” Cole repeats, resting his hand on the girl’s shoulder as he rises to leave.  “Leave all the rest to me.”

Clarke and Peri watch him walk away in silence, lost in their own thoughts, separated from each other by two feet and ninety-seven years.  Then, “I’m sorry, Rebecca,” Peri murmurs to herself, absently toying with something on a silver filigree chain tucked into her blouse.  “Forgive me, for whatever happens next.”

Clarke feels her heart stop beating, as she realizes why the lucid dream-state has brought her here.

_"Follow the sign of infinity."_

She has found the necklace.

There will be no symbols painted in red letters on street corners to guide her in the right direction, Clarke realizes.  The girl in the blue dress is the only map she needs.

When Peri pulls on her blue gloves and walks out the door, Clarke follows her.

* * * * *

As she steps outside the café to follow Miss Gordon – laboratory assistant and probable lover of the long-dead human Rebecca – Clarke feels the ground rock violently beneath her and the whole world blink out of existence.  She finds herself abruptly back inside that inky green-black void, back in the in-between where she awoke before the scent of coffee pulled her through to the café.  She hears flashes of voices tugging her back toward wakefulness – her mother? Lexa? Uncle Marcus? – and half of her wants to let go and float back up to the surface, out of the darkness and into the light.

But the other half of her remembers why she has come, the other half of her is determined to follow the sign of infinity, to find a way to destroy the revenant once and for all.  So she yields to the void, lets it pull her where it will, and when she opens her eyes the café and the cobblestone plaza are gone.

She finds herself in a small parlor, elegantly but simply furnished by someone with modest means but excellent taste.  There are books everywhere, she notices immediately, shelves ringing every wall of the room.  She is alone, at the moment, though she can hear voices in the hall outside – Commander McAdams and Miss Gordon again - and she realizes with a shudder that she is back inside Rebecca’s house.

Two floors up, and ninety-seven years later, her human body sits strapped to a chair in the wreckage of the attic laboratory, while Raven and her mother tend to the chemical apparatus and Uncle Marcus helps Lexa to hunt for the final _neb ankh_.  Clarke suppresses a wave of concern, not for the first time, about what might be happening, about that peculiar disturbance she sensed just now inside that void, where she thought she heard her own voice whisper Rebecca’s name.  But the brutal truth is that there is nothing she can do for them now, except to keep going. 

 _Mother will be safe,_ she tells herself firmly.  _Uncle Marcus will protect her.  It will be all right._

She walks a slow circuit of the room, examining it carefully, taking in the woman Rebecca once was from the traces left in the home she kept.  The blackened, shattered wreckage of the parlor Lexa had led them through this morning retained no traces of her, save some burnt, scattered pages swirling in the cold wind and a few scraps of smashed furniture.  But in life, it was a lovely room and a lovely house, with the unmistakable signs of both its mistresses etched into every line.

Clarke has heard of women who live together like this, though in polite English society it is rarely spoken of.  She remembers, once, when she was small, overhearing Mrs. Sydney gossiping in amused whispers, pretending to be shocked, of a cousin who moved to London to live in what they called a “Boston marriage”; the other ladies gasped and tittered, but Mother had silenced them with a swift and rather savage rebuke, saying she wished Mrs. Sydney’s cousin all the happiness in her marriage – Boston or otherwise – which Mrs. Sydney herself had thus far failed to find with Mr. Sydney, which had been the end of both the conversation and her mother's pretense at friendship with any of those women.  “I don’t give a fig who you marry,” she had informed her daughter in the stern voice she used for parenting lessons she intended to make stick, “as long as you don’t grow up to be anything like Diana Sydney.”

“I won’t,” Clarke had promised.  Then only nine, she was not entirely sure what the fuss was all about, though she was pleased to discover the option not to live with a boy in the house when she grew up if she did not wish it.  And that had been the end of that. 

She has not thought about this memory in years, its importance to her as a child mostly connected to the blissful absence of the highly unpleasant Sydneys from every subsequent dinner party.  But it comes back to her now with a pang as she traces her fingertips along the spines of the leatherbound books on the shelf – books collected from all over the world by Rebecca, and dusted every day by Peri – and thinks about Lexa and Costia.  It would not have been like this for them, she realizes with sadness in her heart.  Not in the wild, superstitious places where Lexa’s work took her.  Not for an eccentric lady scholar whose science was considered witchcraft, and a girl from the peasant classes whom the village believed possessed. 

There would have been no Abby Griffin defending their honor in front of the sneering village women.  And Costia’s father, Clarke feels sure, would not have been as fond of Lexa as Uncle Marcus is.

She is not quite certain – or perhaps, she _tells_ herself she is not certain – why Peri and Rebecca’s comfortable home, and the lovely domestic portrait of the life they had once shared together, should make her think of Lexa, but either way there is no time to dwell on it now.  Her contemplation is interrupted a heartbeat later by the parlor door opening and the sight of Miss Gordon and Commander McAdams entering, deep in the throes of a heated argument.

“I will not have this conversation with you again,” Peri snaps, storming over to a table near the fireplace and busying herself with tidying up the embroidery things to avoid looking at him. 

Cole closes the parlor door and watches her silently, his expression compassionate and sad. “If there were another way, Peri, we would have found it by now,” he tells her, and Clarke watches the angular wings of her shoulderblades draw tightly together through the cotton of her faded blue dress, every bone and muscle taut with anxiety, and she knows Peri knows he speaks only the truth.

Peri looks older, somehow, and Clarke wonders how much time has passed since the café.  Enough time for the vivid blue of the dress to fade and grow dull.  Enough time to transform people who were hesitant even to use Christian names into people who argue as intimately as this.

“You are as mad as she is to even _contemplate_ such a thing,” she hisses, without turning around.  “It is blasphemy.  A sin against God.  It will damn all our souls to hell.  Ours and hers.”

“Then I’ll go to my death asking God’s forgiveness,” Cole says flatly.  “It’s a risk I’m willing to take if it saves hundreds of lives.  Maybe thousands.  I’m a soldier, Peri.  I always knew there was a chance this day might come.”

“I am not a soldier,” she says, turning finally to look at him, eyes blazing with grief and fury.  “I am a _scientist._   I am a scholar, and a woman of faith, and you are asking me to cross a line I cannot cross.”

“Then don’t,” he tells her gently.  “Let me.  Let me bear it for you.  Let me give you at least that much, my friend.  If one of us is to be damned, let it be remembered that I made the choice.”

Clarke freezes, looking from one to the other, thoughts whirling, her blood suddenly running cold in her veins, as the true meaning of their words begins to sink in.

_What if all this time, they had been looking at it backwards?_

“Rebecca could be right,” Peri says desperately, something like panic pulsing in her voice.  “She could be right.  Her discovery might save us all, just as she says it will.”

He shakes his head.  “You are as brilliant as she is, Peri,” he reminds her, “and you have told me yourself that there is no way to utilize it as fuel without destabilizing it.”

“But – “

“It would combust with such force that a quarter of the city would be wiped out in an instant, and thousands more would die from the toxic smoke.  That is what you said.  But in order to use it as a fuel source, the way she claims she always intended, she would have to find a way to hold it in stable suspension in proximity to heat.  And this, you have told me, there is no way to do.”

“Cole – “

“If it cannot remain stable near heat, then it cannot power a factory, Peri.  She has not invented a fuel source that will rebuild France as a world power.  She has invented a weapon.  You know it, I know it, and even Rebecca must know it by now.  She may not wish to admit it to herself, and she may not desire for it ever to be used that way, but _it will be._   If its existence becomes known, if she files for patents and makes public the nature of her discovery, you know exactly what happens next.”

“She is the most brilliant scientist in the history of France," Peri insists stubbornly.  "If anyone can find a way, it will be Rebecca.”

“You have been telling me that for three years,” Cole says sadly.  “But it has changed nothing.”  Peri looks away, eyes bright with tears, and Cole crosses the room in two strides to take her in his arms, holding her in strong warm arms as she weeps into his chest.  “I know, old friend,” he says heavily, pressing a light kiss on the top of her head.  “I know.”

“We cannot do this,” she murmurs, as Clarke feels tears spring to her own eyes at the ache of obvious pain in her voice.  “There has to be another way.”

“If there was another way, we would know it by now,” he reminds her, in a voice of surpassing gentleness.  “Every other possibility has already been considered.  You know it has.”

Peri pulls back, face wet with tears.  Cole hands her his handkerchief and watches with compassion as she dabs at her eyes and struggles to compose herself.  Clarke and Cole see it happen at the same time, the moment the decision is made.  She looks over at the hearth, staring at it almost distantly, as though seeing something that isn’t there, and Clarke realizes this must have been the place Peri’s beloved hounds used to sleep.  The hounds which are now three years gone, the first casualty of Rebecca’s fanatical, single-minded carelessness.  The first lives lost because she was too far gone to listen.

“If I say yes to this,” says Peri, voice trembling, “you must leave enough for me as well.  If I am to agree to the taking of a life, I offer my own as penance.”

Cole nods, as though he expects nothing less.  “And so do I,” he nods gravely.  “It is the price we will pay for the thing we must do, and hope there is a forgiving God.  Besides, it will lend credence to the notion of an accident if there are others in the house.  Can we contain it from spreading to the rest of the neighborhood?”

“In a mixed compound of noble gases, it should remain stable enough to destroy all remaining traces of Rebecca’s work, while controlling the scale of the explosion as much as it can be controlled.  This house, perhaps one or two others.  If we do it on a Sunday, while the neighbors are at church – “

“And the fumes?”

“I don’t know,” she says helplessly.  “Perhaps only a dozen, perhaps as many as five hundred.  It depends on the direction of the wind, on precipitation – if the gases infect rainwater and pollute the rivers – “

“It’s a risk we’ll have to take,” says Cole.  “A dozen lives lost now is better than twenty thousand lost when some fiend hungry for power weaponizes her invention to destroy a whole city.”  Peri nods, biting her lip, tears threatening to swallow her up again.  But Cole does not see.  “Damn her,” he whispers in a soft, low, furious voice.  “Damn her for making us do this.  Damn her, for forcing you to choose.  Damn her, for creating something she must have known she could never control.  Damn her soul to hell for this.”

“You did,” Clarke whispers to him.  But he doesn’t hear.

* * * * *

When the void pulls her in again, it feels different from before.

She can hear Raven and her mother arguing, she can hear loud crashing sounds coming from far away, and she knows something has gone terribly wrong.

 _You can do nothing for them now,_ she tells herself again, rather desperately, letting the void pull her where it will.  Nothing except keep going.  She must follow the sign of infinity down this road all the way to its end.

She must find the final resting place of Rebecca’s silver necklace.

When she opens her eyes, she feels a chill down her spine, and clenches her fists at her side, steeling herself against fear.  She knew this was coming.  She knew this journey would end here.  She ought to have been ready.  But it takes her by surprise nonetheless.

She is standing in the past of her own present.  She is in Rebecca’s laboratory.

The collision of time – of past and present, of her life and Rebecca’s – disorients her for a moment, and she extends a hand to the chair beside her as though half-afraid she will reach out through a century and touch her own warm and solid body sitting in it.  But no, she has not yet been born, she is in Rebecca’s past, and she somehow knows, without quite knowing how she knows it, that she has arrived here to watch Rebecca die.

She watches the woman at the work table for a long moment, searching for traces of Thelonious Jaha’s terrifying wife, but finding none.  This Rebecca is a living, breathing woman.  The same dark glossy hair, the same lovely features and smooth skin, the same slender and elegant frame, but as different from the revenant as night and day.

This Rebecca stands at a work table laden with steam-powered scientific apparatus that would make Lexa and Raven swoon.  Her back is to Clarke, hair caught up in a tangled, unkempt knot above the collar of her plain gray work dress.  Clarke moves slowly through the room, taking in this new, living version of it, the one with color and life, with framed news clippings on the wall and a green shawl cast absentmindedly over the back of a chair and a cheerful yellow tray of cakes and tea sitting on a low table; a far cry from the hollow, blackened shell where Clarke’s unconscious body now sleeps.  She makes her way through the airy, light-filled space until she stands face to face with Rebecca.

But this Rebecca cannot see her any more than anyone else can, so Clarke has the luxury of watching her work.  She is focused, eyes flashing with determination, as she moves swiftly around the complicated machinery, tinkering and stirring and measuring.  Clarke watches strange fluids bubble up through glass tubes, sometimes earning an approving nod and sometimes a frown of irritation, prompting the scientist to adjust the heat of a burner or add another drop of something until she has gotten it right.

Her hair is coming loose from its knot, soft tendrils flying free around her face, and her heavy canvas work apron is stained with a dozen different chemicals.  It is so easy to hate the revenant, to hate her cool glassy stare and her casual cruelty, but this Rebecca is a human being and Clarke has been sent here to watch her die and suddenly she feels as though she might be sick.

She moves a little away from the potent, sickly chemical scent toward the overstuffed velvet chair beside the tea table, to sit and think and watch Rebecca working.  The tea smells heavenly, bitter and sharp and strong, and Clarke is just in the midst of profoundly regretting that she cannot reach out to pour a cup for herself when she stops short, frozen in horror, staring down at the yellow tray as the real meaning of Peri Gordon’s words finally, finally sinks in.

Peri and Cole have exhausted all possible solutions to the problem of forcing Rebecca to abandon her research and destroy the chemical before it falls into the wrong hands.

Peri prepares all Rebecca’s meals herself, and leaves them for her on a tray.

Lexa’s lucid dream state was intended to lead Clarke towards the nest of the revenant, so they all assumed it would send Clarke into Rebecca’s memories.  But in both the café and the parlor, Rebecca was not there.   _“Follow the sign of infinity,”_ Titus had scrawled in his notebook, and he had been right, even though none of them had understood.

He had not meant, “follow the symbol of the revenant.”  He had meant, “follow Peri Gordon.”

The lucid dream state had linked Clarke not to Rebecca – not to the living woman who had died and become a revenant – but to the woman who loved her more than life itself, but murdered her anyway.

Peri Gordon will not have permitted Commander McAdams to take this burden from her shoulders, Clarke realizes as she stares down at the gay yellow china tray.  She will have done this herself.  And then after the deed is done she will brew a second pot of tea, for herself and the commander, and they will sit together by the fireplace in the parlor, where they will reach out and take one another’s hands for comfort, and let an easy, swift death by poison take them before the acrid, corrosive chemical explosion does.

Rebecca wipes her brow, tucking sweat-dampened tendrils back behind her ears, and sets down the measurement device in her hand, looking up suddenly as if only just now remembering the tea tray.  “No!” Clarke calls to her desperately.  "No, Rebecca, don’t!”

But Rebecca does not hear.

She makes her way over to the tea table, tugging off her apron and hanging it on a hook.  Clarke struggles to knock over the table, to spill the tea, to push Rebecca away.  She calls her name over and over.  But it does no good.  Rebecca does not see her or hear her.  When Clarke steps directly into her path, Rebecca moves _through_ her, a chilling and distressing sensation that leaves Clarke feeling faintly sick.  She watches in helpless desperation as Rebecca pours a cup of tea, drops two lumps of sugar and a splash of milk in it, and takes a long, pleased sip.

Everything happens very quickly after that.

It takes less than five seconds for the china cup to come crashing to the floor, another five or ten before Rebecca’s body sways heavily and follows it.  Clarke can see her eyes, wide open, flashing with intelligence, hurt, fury and fear, and she realizes in the last moments before they close forever that Rebecca has already comprehended the entire story.  It took Clarke and Lexa and Titus the combined work of years, but they did not know Peri Gordon the way Rebecca Pramheda did.

Rebecca knows everything.

Commander McAdams and Miss Gordon enter a few minutes later; they must have been waiting nearby for the sound of Rebecca’s fall.  Clarke watches in helpless anguish as they open the door and see the woman’s fallen body in the middle of the floor.  Peri stares at it in frozen shock, face white and pinched as though she is about to be sick; the commander tugs at her hand gently several times before she returns to herself enough to complete the task at hand.  “She will have felt no pain,” he says gently as Peri makes her way to the laboratory table she knows as intimately as Rebecca does.

“Then she is the luckiest of all of us,” says Peri softly, and sets to work.

By the time she finishes, the large beaker containing the entirety of Rebecca’s terrifying creation has been immersed in a bubbling glass contraption with other substances filtering through it.

“Is that all of it?” asks the commander.

“There was a test vial,” says Peri without looking up.  “She had it out on the desk with the post.  Only one drop, and held in stasis, but we had better destroy it too.”

“I’ll go look in her desk.”

“You won’t find it,” says Clarke, though neither of them hear.  She knows exactly where the test vial is - at the moment, safely in Raven's pocket - though she does not know how Titus came by it in the first place.

The commander rummages in ever-increasing frustration for several minutes before Peri finally looks up from her work.  “Done,” she tells him.  “The crack in the third tube will allow the compounds to bleed together, drop by drop.  It will be strong enough for chemical fumes in just a few minutes, and will combust entirely within two hours.”  He nods.  “I’ve made us some tea,” she tells him, voice shaking a little.  “We were down to the very last bit of the lovely black Assam you sent us from China.  We only used it on special occasions. I thought we might . . . finish it together.”

“Two hours,” he says, trying to smile.  “So at least we will have time to enjoy it.”

“Like falling asleep, you said.”

“Yes.  We’ll take a cup of tea, and we shall fall asleep in our chairs, and Rebecca’s folly will be destroyed before any more lives can be lost.”  He takes her hand and leads her out the door.  “Come with me, old friend,” he says gently.  “All of this will be over soon.”

Clarke watches the door close behind them, tears streaming down her cheeks, and waits for the void of lucid dreaming to swallow her up to wherever she is destined to go next.

But nothing happens.

Minutes pass, the clock on the wall ticking with foreboding regularity, as Clarke stares in horrified fascination at the glass apparatus, where a red-gold substance she knows very well indeed drip, drip, drips through a hairsbreadth crack in its glass piping into a large glass beaker of black fluid, which is already beginning to smoke.

Rebecca lies still on the floor, body contorted in the graceless rigidity of death, and Clarke realizes with a bolt of panic that she has no way out of this room.  If she is linked to Peri Gordon’s memories, then her connection to the dream world will be severed the minute the girl drinks that poisoned tea, leaving her stranded; and even if she knew how to wake herself up, which she does not – this is Raven’s task – she cannot extract herself from the lucid dream state without uncovering the revenant’s nest, or all is lost.

The fumes swirling out of the glass beaker grow thick and orange and viscous, spilling over the glass rim like silk, and begin to wreathe their inventor’s fallen body in ever-thickening clouds.

 _Please, please, please,_ she begs whoever or whatever has been guiding her all this while.   _Please take me to whatever place comes next.  I am so close.  I can feel it.  Please let me finish this task, to save the people I love._

She closes her eyes, counts to ten, and opens them again.

Nothing.

She does it again, and again.  But nothing happens.

The clock ticks.  The room fills with orange smoke.  Downstairs, Miss Gordon is serving Commander McAdams the very last cup of tea of his life.  But this cannot be the end of the line, because Miss Gordon died in this house with the necklace around her throat, and if the necklace had been found in the building’s wreckage, Titus would know.

_So where did the revenant take it after Peri Gordon died?_

Clarke closes her eyes, acrid chemical smoke beginning to sting her nostrils.  She counts again, desperately.

_One._

_Two._

_Three._

_Four._

_Five._

_Six._

_Seven._

_Eight._

_Nine._

_Ten._

She opens her eyes and recoils in shock.

The room is suddenly, horribly, filled with people.

People she knows.

_How did the servants get here?_

“Hello, Clarke,” says Rebecca pleasantly, red silk skirts swishing as she makes her way across the room.  Clarke’s blood freezes in her veins at the sound of the revenant’s voice, backing up reflexively until she feels the windowsill press into her back and realizes she has gone as far as she can go.

But the second Rebecca is not the most terrifying thing in the room, Clarke realizes, as a dark shape moves through the now nearly-opaque clouds of chemical smoke and steps out into the light.

“Uncle Marcus?” she whispers, voice trembling, as she realizes he is holding a knife.

“I don’t want to hurt you,” he says in a low, gentle voice – a voice she recognizes, a voice she loves.  “But we cannot allow you to proceed any further.”

“Why are you doing this?”

“Marcus has joined me,” says Rebecca.  “As have all the others.  They are currently dismantling the roof of this house, and they will make their way inside this room within a matter of minutes.  It is over, Clarke.  Come quietly, and your friends and family will not be hurt.”

“Uncle Marcus, don’t do this,” Clarke pleads as he moves closer and closer towards her, smiling kindly, the crowd of bodies pushing through the orange fog to advance on her like an army.  He holds the knife in his hand casually, as though he has forgotten it is even there, but Clarke can think of nothing else.

Lexa did not tell her what happens to someone who dies in the lucid dream state, but Lexa could not have predicted this.  Clarke is still inside a dream world where nothing responds to her touch; she cannot lift this chair and use it as a shield, she cannot smash the glass vials and distract them with an explosion.  She has no weapons.  And even if she had, she could never use them.  Not on Jackson, not on Bellamy, not on the Millers.

Not on Uncle Marcus.

 _Think, Clarke,_ she commands herself fiercely, mind in a whirl as the mob of her revenant-possessed friends advance menacingly through the orange fog.   _Think.  You can use nothing in this room.  You have no tools except your own brain, and whatever you brought here with you._

She scans head to toe, a swift and brutal inventory.  Nothing in her pockets.  Hair loosely plaited with ribbon, not even a pin.  No brooch, either, nothing sharp or pointed which could serve, in these desperate times, as a weapon; no jewelry at all, except -

She freezes.  

_Except Jacob Griffin’s silver pocketwatch._

If the real one protects her in the real world, the dream one might keep her safe here.

She tugs it out from the collar of her dress just as Marcus reaches her, knife raised almost lazily.  She ducks under his blow and steps inside his arms as though to embrace him, then presses the silver face of the watch directly against his heart.

A collective hiss of pain erupts from everyone in the room, loudest of all from Rebecca.  The shapes in the orange fog pause, hesitating, suddenly realizing Clarke has a weapon she knows how to use.  Uncle Marcus struggles to pull away from her, but she holds him tight about the waist and does not let go, trying to close her ears against his strangled cries of pain.

When she finally lets go he staggers backward into the fog, staring at her with cold revenant fury in his eyes, but for a moment - just for a moment - she sees a flash of something else.

For a split second, he is Marcus Kane again.

Even in the dream world, Jacob Griffin’s watch keeps her safe.

“Drop the watch, Clarke,” says Rebecca in her crisp, toneless voice.  “You have no way out of this room, and if you die in this dream state, your mind in the real world will never regain consciousness.  Peri Gordon is dead, and your link to her memories is severed.  Let go of the watch, and we will send you back.”

The window behind Clarke is open, orange smoke beginning to pour out of it.   They will evacuate the entire Thirteenth Arrondissement soon, and three hundred people will die, and she can do nothing to stop it because none of this is real, and the window will not close for her.

There is a tiny wrought-iron balcony outside - not much, barely the size to hold a few potted plants.  Still holding out her silver watch to repel the others, she scrambles backwards out of it, hunting frantically for any other way down to the street.

“If you jump, you will die,” Uncle Marcus explains to her, patiently, as though to a child.  “Drop the necklace into the street, and come back inside, and we will send you back.  You will wake up, and this will be over.”

“If I wake up without finding the revenant’s nest, you are lost to us forever,” she says to him.  “I will bring you back to my mother, or die trying.  I will not let another man she loves die if I can stop it.”

There it is again.  

Just for a moment.

A flicker, deep in the coffee-brown depths of Marcus Kane’s eyes, something stirring, something that is not Rebecca, something that makes Rebecca’s lovely head tilt sharply and regard him with something that might be . . . uncertainty.

“Abby,” she presses him.  “Her name is Abby.  You have loved her all your life.  She is out there right now, on the other side, trying to keep me alive so that I can save you.  So that I can bring you home.”

“Abby,” he pronounces carefully, as though testing out a word in an unfamiliar language, and she watches in puzzlement as his fingertips fumble almost unconsciously below his collar, as though searching for something that ought to be around his neck but is not.

And suddenly Clarke knows everything.

“You took the rings off,” she reminds him urgently.  “Because the last _neb ankh_ was around her neck, and there was no other way to get to it.  You sacrificed yourself to keep Mother and me safe.  You destroyed it.  But you didn’t die.” Marcus’ brow furrows, as though he is trying very hard to recognize her, as though he knows he ought to know who she is, but cannot altogether place her. “Even without the ring, he was protecting you,” she presses him.  “Even without the ring, Father is keeping us all safe.  Your friend, Jacob Griffin, saved your life.  Uncle Marcus, please.   _Please._  You have to fight this.  You have to remember.”

And for a moment - just for a moment - she could swear, he does.

Then, “Marcus,” says Rebecca firmly.  “Knife.”  And suddenly it’s over, Uncle Marcus is gone, her brief moment is over, and she is trapped once more on a tiny wrought-iron balcony with no escape.

 _Please,_ she begs, not sure who she is asking, but desperate anyway.   _Please.  I need help._

And then it happens.  Swift and sudden and appearing out of nowhere.  Like a miracle.

“Clarke!”

Clarke whirls around in shock.

_"Lexa?"_

Against all probability, _Lexa is there,_ Lexa is standing right beside her on the tiny balcony, her eyes bright with intelligence and courage and faith, and Clarke is no longer alone.  “Do you trust me?” Lexa demands, but Clarke is too stunned to speak.  “We have less than a minute before this building catches fire, Clarke, do you trust me?”

“I do,” Clarke whispers breathlessly, “I do trust you.”

“Then hold on,” Lexa commands her.  “Whatever happens, Clarke, _don’t let go_.”

Then she wraps her arms around Clarke’s waist and takes one great long step into nothingness, as they fall three stories away from the dying woman buried in clouds of orange smoke above them.

The void opens up, and swallows them whole.

* * *

**ABBY**

 The pounding from the roof was deafening.

Showers of plaster dust, some clean, some burnt, floated down over them like black and white snow.  Neither Abby nor Raven could prevent their gaze from darting nervously upward, over and over, no matter how hard they struggled to focus on the two unconscious girls in front of them.  Those were their friends on the roof, and since they could not feel pain or exhaustion, they worked diligently and patiently to dismantle the roof shingle by shingle, past all bounds of human endurance, spurred on by the revenant controlling their bodies and minds.  They had no tools, and Abby felt sick at the thought of their bruised and bloodied hands, at the dark and terrible thought of what might happen if one of them fell. 

But she could do nothing for them from here, it was all down to Clarke and Lexa now.  All she could do was stand watch over the two girls, and hope.

She fingered the silver beads of Vera Kane’s rosary around her wrist.  Jacob’s silver ring had kept Marcus safe, she knew it down to the very marrow of her bones.  The blast in the hallway ought to have killed him, but somehow it had not.  Somewhere, Jacob had done everything in his power to keep Abby from losing another man she loved, and somewhere, whatever piece of him was left in that silver pocketwatch protected his daughter now. 

Abby was not religious, particularly, but she liked the rosary.  The ritual of it.  Soft quiet words, repeated over and over.  And she'd always been rather fond of the Virgin Mary.  She bathed her daughter's wrists in cool water with one hand, watching the hypodermic syringe seeping the hallucinatory liquid into her bloodstream, and clicked the silver rosary beads through the fingers of her other hand, and she thought about a Virgin Mary with Vera Kane's face.  Vera, steady and strong.  Faith like a rock - in God, in her son, in people.  Vera and Mary would understand her, if anyone would.  Abby did not quite feel she had the right, as someone whose sense of the Divine was intermittent at best, to invoke the protection of someone as lofty as the Mother of God in this moment, but she had never been afraid to ask for anything from Vera Kane.  And, well, perhaps it was not entirely correct to pray to Vera as though Vera herself were a saint (although really, who knew, perhaps she was; six months ago Abby did not even know revenants existed, but certainly it had become hard to deny that the afterlife seemed to contain more complexity than Sunday School had ever taught her).  But she did not give a damn whether it was correct or not; all she knew was that here, in this moment, as she watched over her daughter, reaching out with her mind to beg any force that might be listening to intercede and keep Clarke safe, the only thing in the world she wanted was the comfort of another mother by her side.

She ran the silver beads through her fingers and closed her eyes, imagining Vera Kane's warm, steady hand on her shoulder.  _Help me protect our children,_ she whispered in her mind.  _My daughter and your son.  The two people I love best in all the world.  Please, if you can hear me.  Please keep them safe._

She did not know how long she sat like that, head bowed, eyes closed, lost in something like prayer, before the sound of her own name startled her out of her own reverie.  Raven was clutching at her forearm, eyes wide with panic.  "Abby," she whispered.  "Abby." 

Something had happened.  Something had changed.  Lexa was suddenly restless, thrashing in her chair, and although Clarke remained still, her lips had begun to move, as though she were struggling to speak.  “Increase the dosage,” she ordered Raven, who ran back to the table to fiddle with knobs and dials.  “She’s trying to tell us something.”

“Can you understand her?”

“Not yet.  She’s still trying . . “  Abby reached out and took Clarke’s face between her hands, kissing the sleeping girl’s forehead.  “Please, love,” she whispered, “please.  Please tell me.  Please, if you’ve found something, if you can hear me, help us.  You’re the only one who can.”

“Peri . . .” Clarke croaked out in a rough voice.  “Peri . . . Gordon.”

Raven whirled around with a start.  “What did she say?” she demanded.

“I don’t know, it sounded like – “

“Peri . . .” Clarke rasped again, eyes still closed.  "It always . . . belonged . . . to Peri . . ."

“Raven, I don’t – what is she - "

"Oh, sweet God in Heaven," Raven exclaimed, eyes shining, lit with wild, incandescent triumph.  "That's it.  That's it.  She's done it."  She gave Clarke's unconscious head a gleeful, smacking kiss.  "God bless that brilliant brain of hers.  She's just told me how to find the revenant's nest, Abby, _I know where the necklace is.”_

“How can you possibly – “

“I’ve read the journal too, I know everything about Rebecca that Titus did.  I know who Peri Gordon is and I know where to find the necklace.  And if I’m right, it’s only ten streets away.”

“It’s not in the house?”

“No."

"Then where is it?"

"Rebecca has ears everywhere, Abby, if I say it aloud, she'll know."

“Raven – “

“Can you work the controls by yourself without me?”

“Raven, you can’t cross the line of silver, or they’ll come after you.  It’s too dangerous.”

“I have to.”

“She already has Marcus,” Abby protested desperately, tears stinging her eyes.  “I can’t lose you, too.”

Raven wrapped her arms around the older woman in a fierce, tight embrace.  “I’ll bring him back,” she promised.  “I’ll bring them all back.  Abby, _I know I’m right._ You just need to hold them off until I get there.  But I can do this.  I can do this.  You have to trust me.  _Please_.”

Abby looked at her for a long moment, at the breathless, desperate certainty in her eyes, the plaster dust in her hair, the tightly-coiled tension of her body, and realized that there was only one thing she could possibly say.

 _“Run,”_ she whispered, as the girl took off at a sprint out the door, chunks of falling plaster crashing down behind her.

Abby looked up, and saw a patch of gray sky through the gaping hollow that had suddenly opened up in the roof above her head.  The wait was over, then.  Their last defense had been breached.  The revenant army was on its way. 

She gave the silver beads one last press before slipping them back around her wrist, sending one last silent plea to Vera before rising up from where she knelt on the floor to retrieve the pistol from the table and take up a defensive stance between the two unconscious girls and the cavernous opening in the ceiling, with that crowd of unrecognizable yet familiar faces staring blankly down at her.

A dark shape dropped suddenly and sharply into the room, landing with an impossibly heavy crash that caused a cloud of dust and century-old ash to swirl up in a cloud around him.

She took a long, deep breath to steady herself.  She had expected this all along. She had known this was exactly what Rebecca would do. 

_Breathe in.  Breathe out._

_No matter what happens, you must keep them from getting to Clarke.  Without Clarke, all is lost.  Even he would tell you that, if he could.  Even he would tell you to do what must be done._

"I'm so sorry," she told him, swallowing back the rising knot of tears, as she raised Marcus Kane's pistol to aim it square at his own chest.

* * *

**CLARKE**

For a long, horrifying moment, Clarke thinks she is about to wake up, that Lexa has come to pull her back because their mission has been abandoned.  True, Lexa saved her life, pulled her out of a burning building before she suffocated, but they are still no closer to the revenant’s nest, and Clarke's first emotion is that of panicked frustration.  Has she lost already?

The in-between pulls them into its inky green depths, and the sounds on the other side grow louder and louder.  It is not clear to Clarke, exactly, how time passes between there and here - she spent hours in Rebecca’s lab, yet perhaps it has only been moments for her mother.  There is so much she does not understand.  She hears Raven speak her mother's name, over and over, and the certain knowledge that both of them yet live buoys her spirits.  And now, at the very least, she is no longer alone.

But still.  Peri Gordon is dead and buried, which means the link to her memories no longer exists, and Clarke is lost in the void without a map.  She followed the sign of infinity to a dead end, to the house where Peri died, but since the necklace was never discovered at the house, after all that Clarke was still no closer to finding -

Wait.

Stop.

It was _there_ , just for a moment.  The answer was in front of her.  Something floated up to the surface of her mind, then disappeared again, but just for a second, she had it.

 _Think, Clarke,_ she commands herself desperately.  _Think._

It all feels different this time, without the trajectory of Peri’s memories to guide them.  The void seems content to wait.  It will be left to Clarke, this time, to tell it where to go.

_Peri Gordon is dead and buried . . ._

Triumph bursts forth inside Clarke’s chest.  There it is.  The solution is in front of her.

“I know where to find the necklace, Lexa!” she calls through the darkness.  “I know what we must do now."

“Then take us there,” Lexa calls back.  “We are almost out of time.”

Clarke presses her eyes closed, takes a deep breath, and concentrates as hard as she can.

The in-between place resists her this time, with no Peri Gordon to guide her.  But Clarke holds firm.  She knows, now.  She knows everything.  The darkness tugs at her, sluggish and thick like a river of molasses, but she does not waver.  The memory of Marcus Kane’s shadowy form stepping through orange fog spurs her forward with relentless force; because if Uncle Marcus can no longer be trusted, then her mother is in greater danger than ever.  So she reaches through the dark to clutch at Lexa’s hand and pulls them both through the darkness back into the light.

She smells the rain before she feels it, and a distant corner of her mind registers this peculiar detail of the dream world.  The rain here lands on her skin, dampens her hair.  It responds to her as though she were real, like the cafe tables and chairs did; a tiny little anchor of reality to hold onto.

She opens her eyes to see dingy, half-dead grass, dull gray skies and a massive, gnarled tree, blackened with age.  They are alone on a hill, mossy and gloomy and lonesome, the forlorn caw of crows echoing in the distance, and Clarke looks down to see a pale shape at her feet exactly where she expected to find it.

They are standing at Rebecca’s grave.

“It’s no use,” says Lexa, realizing instantly where they are and what Clarke has done.  “Her grave is not the revenant’s nest, Clarke.  I have come to this place in a lucid dream state a thousand times, with no success.  Rebecca’s necklace was not buried with her body.”

“I know,” Clarke responds.  “That is not why we are here.”  She looks down at the dull gray stone made duller by rain, an unprepossessing flat rectangle surrounded by weeds.  No seraphim or marble cross, no grandeur, no words from Shakespeare or heartfelt eulogy.  Nothing but a name and two dates etched roughly in granite to mark the final resting place of one of France’s greatest scientific minds.  “This is the potter’s field,” she realizes.  “The burial place given to strangers and sinners.  Look, down below, and you can see, we are on the wrong side of the cemetery gates.”

“Unhallowed ground,” nods Lexa.  “Because she took her own life, albeit indirectly, and received no absolution for it.  When the experiment went wrong, she was responsible for three hundred deaths, including her own.”

“No,” says Clarke, something like excitement in her voice that startles the other girl into staring at her as the pieces continue to click together.  “No, Lexa.   _She wasn’t._ ”  She gives the humble stone a last glance, full of emotion, then makes her way rapidly down the wet, rough path towards the cemetery proper, on the other side of a pair of majestic iron gates.

“What on earth do you mean?” asks Lexa, astonished, following after her.

“The lucid dream state did as you promised it would,” Clarke explains.  “It linked me to the death which took place in that room, and the story of the necklace.  But it was the wrong story.  I know the last piece of the puzzle now.  I know the answer to the one question Titus never asked.”

“What question?”

“How a woman like Rebecca - arrogant, perhaps, but enlightened, dedicated to the good of mankind - _ever became a revenant in the first place_.”

Lexa stops short, staring at her.  “I never thought of that,” she says uncertainly, and Clarke can see she is shaken by this.  “Her existence, her nature, her history, these were all simply facts I accepted as truth.  I never asked him _why_.”

“I know why,” says Clarke, pushing open the gate.  “Because she was buried in unsanctified ground as punishment for a sin she never committed.”  Lexa stares at her, eyes wide, shocked into silence.  “Rebecca Pramheda did not take her own life,” Clarke goes on, navigating swiftly through the rows of white marble statues with unhesitating ease, her feet sure of their path even in this unfamiliar place.  She can feel the nest of the revenant calling to her, she can feel how near they are, and she moves along the wet grass with swift surety.  “I was there, Lexa.  I saw it.  I saw all of it.  The necklace was not buried with Rebecca’s body because _the necklace was not Rebecca’s._  You were paying your visits to the wrong grave.”  Lexa's eyes widen further, the final pieces of Titus’ lifelong quest now clicking into place inside her mind like the gears of a watch.  “None of us understood what the necklace meant,” Clarke continues, words tumbling out in an urgent rush, “or why it mattered so much to her.  Why it was the final talisman.  We believed it was a memento of her past life, but why would it be?  When you told us yourself that her humanity was the greatest weapon we had to use against her.  Why would she keep such a thing only to remind herself of her life as the human Rebecca?  No, we were wrong about the necklace.  That is the piece we were all missing, for everything else to fit.  The necklace is not a symbol of her humanity, Lexa.  It is a symbol of _vengeance._  Vengeance upon the woman who killed her.”

“So she did not take her own life,” Lexa whispers.  “She was murdered.  She deserved to be buried in sacred ground.”

Clarke nods.  “I watched her die, Lexa.  She _knew._  She knew there was poison in the tea and she knew who put it there.  That is the reason it is only women she hunts; Mayor Jaha was useful, she needed a way to escape Paris and he was an easy mark.  But all the rest have been women.  Mostly young.  Mostly with dark hair.   _That_ is why the final _neb ankh_ is the most powerful, Lexa, because it’s the symbol of the hate and betrayal and lust for vengeance that damned her soul in the first place.  Titus never found the necklace when he exhumed the remains of her body, because _it was never hers at all._  It belonged to Peri Gordon, who wore it the day she died, and it was buried around her neck.”

“Good God,” whispers Lexa.  “You’ve found it.  Clarke, _you’ve found it.”_

“All this time, the one question Titus never asked,” Clarke murmurs thoughtfully.  “The question of how a scientist with a soul that wanted to do good became a revenant in the first place.  She was arrogant, she was careless, she went a trifle mad with power; but she did it for a cause she believed would make the world better.  There was no real evil in her, not really.  There was no evil in any of them.  How did Rebecca Pramheda, inventor and scholar, become a revenant who lives off the blood of women, drained from their very hearts?”

“Because her own was broken," Lexa finishes for her.  “Peri Gordon might have saved untold thousands of lives from destruction at the hands of a deadly weapon, but she betrayed the love of her life to do it."

“Exactly.  Peri Gordon took her own life, and Rebecca’s, and Cole McAdams' as well.  Cole and Peri were responsible for those three hundred deaths.  But they were buried in sacred ground, while Rebecca was not.  None of them were wicked, Lexa.  I saw them all.  They all thought they were doing good.  But Rebecca walks the earth as a revenant because her soul has not received justice.  You and I are going to give it to her.”

The distant, echoing lament of the crows that has been floating through the gray sky since the moment they arrived here begins to crescendo, suddenly, into a deafening roar, sending shivers down their spines.  There were only a few on the other side of the gates, but there seem to be dozens of them here.  Ominous funereal birds following them them through an empty graveyard . . . could Rebecca have found them?  Is it a sign? 

Clarke grips Lexa’s hand more tightly in her own as the instinct which has guided her unerringly this far sends her down one final bend in the path, around a vast lane of mausoleums, grand and imposing as a small city, and they emerge into a small plot of elegant but simple white stones etched in French, Latin and even Greek.  _“_ _Cimetière des Savantes,“_  Lexa reads from the brass plaque nailed to the iron gate.  "'Graveyard of the Scientists.'"

They have found Peri Gordon's grave.

The sky here is thick with black birds, wings flapping, shrieking cries that make Clarke’s heart beat faster.  A few of them scatter at the girls’ approach, swarming up into the sky before settling back down again.  Lexa starts violently at this, tugging Clarke by the hand and pulling her forcibly back out through the gate.  “They can _hear_ us,” she hisses.  “Something here is not right, Clarke.  The birds know we have come.”

“Lexa, we don’t have much time –"

“Has any creature,” Lexa demands, gripping Clarke fiercely by the shoulders, “human or animal, all the time you have been in the lucid dream state – has _any_ creature responded to your presence?”  Clarke stares at her, the truth beginning to dawn, and looked back over at the crows with a pounding heart.  “No,” Lexa  answers for her.  “Not man nor beast nor inanimate object.  You could not even take the teacup from Rebecca’s hand.  No one who naturally inhabits this world, in which we are only visitors, is capable of hearing or seeing us.  No one except the revenant.  Which leads to the question . . . _how do the crows know that we are here?”_

Blind panic courses through Clarke, who whirls around to search for a flicker of red silk disappearing behind a grave, to strain her ears and listen for the telltale lilt of Rebecca's inhuman voice.  But nothing stirs around her, except a pair of black wings flapping toward them as a bird alights on the iron fence, looking up at Clarke with keen awareness in its beady black eyes, and suddenly Clarke shocks the life out of Lexa by bursting out laughing.

"My God," she exclaims.  "She's here.  On the other side, Lexa.  She found it too.  She's _here_."

"Rebecca?"

"No, not Rebecca," she says, elation surging upwards in her breast as she pulls Lexa back through the gateway and follows the lone bird through the Graveyard of the Scientists to a lone white obelisk in the far corner, around which the rest of the flock swoops in and gathers expectantly, watching the girls approach.  “Lexa, they aren’t crows.  They’re _ravens.”_

“What?”

“She’s here, Lexa,” Clarke says again, kneeling down in front of the stone.  “On the other side.  In the real world.  She solved it, too.  I don’t know how, but she did.  Raven is _here,_ and she’s found the real necklace.” 

The flock of ravens part politely to allow her to see the words etched on the white surface. “PERI GORDON.  SCHOLAR, SCIENTIST, CHERISHED SISTER.”

“’Sister,’” Lexa mutters under her breath, scuffing the toe of her boot into the dirt and looking away at the horizon.  “They made me write that for Costia, too.”

“Lexa –"

“You were right,” she says gruffly, interrupting Clarke to change the subject pointedly.  “The rest of it doesn't matter now.  All that matters is that you were right.” And she kneels down beside Clarke, the ravens flocking around them, as two pairs of hands and dozens of sharp little beaks scrabble frantically in the dirt, hoping to unearth what lies beneath Peri Gordon’s tombstone.

“Please, please, please,” Clarke murmurs, not sure to whom she is pleading – God? Raven? Her father? Peri? – but with every handful of dirt she unearths, her sense of urgency begins to increase, and the thought she has been fighting to suppress forces itself closer and closer to the surface.

Because if Lexa is here, with her – if Lexa is unconscious too, strapped into a chair beside her . . .  and if Uncle Marcus was taken by the revenant, lost to them all until Rebecca is destroyed for good . . . and if Raven ran the ten streets up the hill from Rebecca’s house to the graveyard to hunt for the silver necklace . . .

. . . then Abby, at this very moment, is trapped inside Rebecca’s house with an army closing in and no one to help her.

"I'm coming, Mother," Clarke whispers, as she plunges her hands into the grave.

* * *

**ABBY**

“Put down the gun, Abby, you don't know how to shoot," Marcus said pleasantly, advancing slowly through the room to where Abby stood guarding the two girls as another shape dropped heavily through the gaping, cavernous hole in the roof to join him. 

Jackson. 

Of _course_ it would be Jackson. 

Rebecca would wish it to be as difficult for her as possible.

She watched helplessly as Jackson made his way to the door, a long, shattered spar of wood in hand, and pushed aside the ring of ivy and silver encircling the room.  The proximity appeared to pain him, but he was not in control of his own body.  All it took was a breach of a few inches, a handful of coins and a few sprigs of greenery knocked aside, out into the hallway, and it was all over.  Just like that, the spell was broken. All Lexa’s knowledge, all those hours of labor, all their hope, vanished in a second because none of them had thought it possible Rebecca might bring human bodies with her and use them as brute force.  Because none of them had prepared for the possibility that an army of people who had once been their friends might rip a stone roof from its foundations.

Abby breathed in and out, slow, focused, holding the pistol steady.  She could not let herself look at Jackson’s bloody hands.  She could not let herself look into Marcus Kane’s eyes.  Nothing mattered now but the gun in her hand, and Clarke.  She backed up far enough to feel the girls' knees press gently against the back of her long skirts, making herself a wall between them and the rest of the room.

They were so young, all three of them.  Raven, Lexa, Clarke.  Too damned young for the weight of this responsibility.  But they were all the hope Abby had left, and they had never yet failed her, so they would have to be enough.

She cocked the pistol. 

This was where she would make her last stand.

Body after body dropped through the hole in the ceiling, filling up the room.  Maya landed badly, Abby could hear her ankle crack, but the girl felt no pain, advancing with the same serene smile as the others despite the grind of broken bone on bone.  They closed in on her in a semicircle, leaving her no escape, but they moved slowly, almost casually, like a hunter drawing its net closed so gently that the prey has no time to panic and bolt.  They could have attacked immediately, but they did not.  They appeared, strangely, to be waiting for something.

“He will die if you fire,” said Marcus in that curiously flat voice that meant Rebecca was speaking for him.  “My powers do not extend to the protection of the human shell.  There will be no reviving him.”

“I am well aware of that.”

“Then tell me where Raven is," he said, "and the human man maybe permitted to live."

And there it was.  The reason why the advancing army had not descended on her like a flock of harpies, tearing her limb from limb, despite outnumbering her considerably.  The reason Rebecca had sent Marcus first, to tempt her into compliance.

There were limits to Rebecca's knowledge, and she no longer controlled Abby or Raven's minds.  Whatever Clarke had whispered in her sleep, no one on the roof had heard it, and whatever Raven had realized, only Raven knew what it was.  The revenant, Abby realized with triumph, was _afraid._   Raven was gone, protected by her own silver talisman, and Rebecca's compound and Titus' book had both gone with her.  There was nothing left in this room to tell Rebecca what Raven knew, whether her secret had truly been discovered, or how much danger she was in . . . except for Abby.

"Raven did not tell me where she went," said Abby, which was, in fact, partially true.  The name "Peri Gordon" meant nothing to her, but she knew it must to Rebecca, so she steeled herself, refusing to speak it.

Marcus, said nothing for a long moment, reading her face carefully.  The revenant could twist a human mind against itself, and Abby watched hopelessly as Marcus' intimate knowledge of her - decades of watching her even when she had not known he was looking, cataloging her every expression, her most subtle half-smile or change in look as familiar to him as though she were a part of himself - became, in an instant, Rebecca's weapon.  Marcus Kane could always tell when she was lying, so now the revenant could too.

"Perhaps she did not," he conceded.  "But you are not telling the truth.  You know something which you refuse to speak."  Abby did not answer.  "Their lives mean nothing to me," Rebecca-Marcus went on flatly.  "They have served their purpose.  I could make any of them kill themselves, or each other, with no effort at all.  This would be unpleasant for you to watch." 

 _Do not react,_ Abby commanded herself, swallowing down the rising knot of fear and panic.  _Stall them.  Buy Raven time.  Do not let them see you afraid._

"Harm any one of them," she told Marcus, "and you will never know what we know.  We will tell you nothing."

"We?" Marcus repeated, looking from Abby to Clarke, tilting his head, and Abby realized what she had done.  "So Clarke has discovered something in her dream-state and spoke of it to Raven.  Clarke also knows what Raven knows."  He gave a faint nod of his head, and the circle around the three women tightened.  All these faces, so dear to her, yet so unrecognizable now.  Blank and flat and empty, the same banal smile on all their faces.  Maya.  Bellamy.  The Millers.  Lincoln.  And she had been the one to send them away, thinking it was the only way to keep them safe.  _I’m so sorry,_ she whispered to all of them.  _I’m so sorry._  

"If you will not tell us, then perhaps your daughter will," Marcus said pleasantly, as he knelt down to the ground and picked up a charred fragment of wood, heavy enough for a weapon.  Abby swallowed hard. 

She could.  If she had to.  If it was the only way to protect Clarke.  She could.

She did not know if she could live with herself after, but she did not have the luxury of contemplating that now.

But the weapon was not intended for any of them.

Marcus advanced towards the table of impossibly delicate glass-and-metal chemical apparatus which was all that kept Clarke and Lexa in their dream state, and Abby suddenly understood.  Rebecca would wake the girls by force, and attempt to make them speak.  

And if they did, even by accident . . . if the confusion of returning to consciousness loosened Clarke's tongue, and she said Peri Gordon's name aloud . . . then Rebecca and her army would know where Raven went and fly there to intercept her, before either she in the real world or Clarke in the dream-world could complete their urgent tasks.

She could not permit Marcus to destroy the machine.  Whatever it cost her.  He would never forgive her if she did not find a way to stop him.

“Marcus, don’t!” Abby pleaded, desperation in her voice, hoping against hope that when he looked up at her she might see some trace of the Marcus she loved.  Their eyes met.  He paused, hesitating, ever so faintly, as she moved closer and closer towards him, pistol still aimed at his heart.  “Marcus,” she whispered.  “Marcus.  Remember.  I know there is a part of you inside that can still remember.”

“He does not hear you,” said the voice that was not Marcus’ voice, and raised his spar to bring it crashing down on the vials of glass.

 _Forgive me,_ Abby whispered silently, and then she pulled the trigger.


	12. The End

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> okay I lied THIS is the last chapter, I broke it off at a cliffhanger because I'm evil

A very great many things happened very quickly after that.

Maya’s scream of pain was first, shocking Abby into turning to watch in horror as she crumpled to the ground, and for a heartbeat Abby thought she had shot the girl by mistake.  But no, it was her ankle, it was her injury from the fall, but she had not been able to feel it then, which meant that now –

“Mother,” Clarke whispered from behind her, and she whirled around.  “Mother, we did it.  It’s over.  It’s over.”

Abby dropped to her knees in front of Clarke’s chair, yanking free the restraints and the syringe, and pulled her daughter into her arms.  “You saved us, my darling,” she whispered into the girl’s golden hair.  “I knew you would.”

“Not just me,” Clarke told her, voice muffled by the fabric of her mother’s dress as she burrowed closer, like a child seeking comfort, relief and exhaustion and weeks of pent-up fear draining out of her all at once.  “We only did half of it.  The other half was Raven.”

Abby stared. “How do you know?”

“We all arrived at the same place,” Clarke explained.  “We’ll tell you everything when she returns.  But she saved us all too.”  She looked over at Lexa. “And Lexa saved me,” she said quietly, as the girl swallowed hard and looked away.

“Thank you,” said Abby softly, taking the other girl’s hands in her own.  “For keeping her safe.”  Lexa didn’t answer.  “There was another girl, once,” said Abby, cradling Lexa’s cheek in her gentle hands, “whom you could not protect.  You have been tormenting yourself with that guilt for far too long.  I hope that now, perhaps, you can let that go.  Costia has justice, now, because of you.  We are all safe, and alive, because of you.”  Impulsively, she pulled Lexa into her arms and embraced her. 

The girl resisted, at first, stiff and hesitant, clearly unaccustomed to overtures of familial affection.  But Abby had spent all her adult life filling her household with orphaned strays, and when she saw a young person in need of mothering she rarely waited for an invitation, so Lexa had little choice but to permit herself to be embraced – and, implicitly, adopted into the family.  She was one of theirs now; it was as simple as that.

A noise from behind her startled Abby into suddenly becoming aware, once more, that the room was full of people, and she turned with a pounding heart to see Marcus staring at his bloodied hands, a slow red stain blossoming between his breast and his shoulder.  Her shot had gone wide, but most importantly, he could _feel_ it.  His jaw was clenched, his whole body shaking, agony written across his face.  “No,” he whispered, voice broken, choked with pain.  “No.”

“Go to him,” Clarke told her gently, reading her mother’s thoughts without needing to hear them spoken aloud.  She placed her hand on Abby’s shoulder and prodded her gently.  “I’m all right.  He needs you.  Go.”

So she rose from the floor and made her way to where Marcus stood staring at his hands, unmoving, as though shock had taken over and he had no idea where he was.  She said his name, but he did not respond, face growing pale, hands trembling, dark anguish in his eyes.  If she let herself look at his face for too long, she thought it might break her heart, so she distracted herself with the more urgent matter at hand, swallowing back her storm of emotions and burying them behind a crisp, professional tone.  "I need to see how badly you're hurt," she informed him, pulling open his shirt to reveal fresh scarlet blood seeping out of the gash in his shoulder.  The sheer amount of it caused her heart to constrict, but there was a basin of hot water powering the steam-operated chemical apparatus, and after she tore free a strip of cloth from the hem of his shirt, soaked it, and began to clean the wound, her panic eased a little.  It had looked a great deal worse than it was.  A deep scratch, but a scratch only; no bullet hole in his flesh, no exit wound.  “You will be sore for a good long time,” she told him, a little sternly, relief and sorrow and love and the sudden evaporation of such potent fear making her sound almost irritated, “but no lasting damage.  Fortunately for you, I have never fired a pistol before in my life.”

But Marcus did not hear a word she said.  It was not until she had neatly bandaged his shoulder - his shirt was torn to shreds, but there was no help for it - and lifted her hands to his face, guiding him down to look into her eyes, that the world snapped back into focus and he finally saw her.

"Abby," he murmured in something like astonishment.  "Oh God, Abby."  He cradled her face in his battered, bruised hands, resting his forehead against her own.  “Are you all right?”

She stared at him for a long moment, feeling the room come back to life around her, tears streaming down her face, and then suddenly stunned him into silence as she burst out laughing.  “I _shot_ you,” she told him.  “Christ in Heaven, Marcus, you’ve been _shot_.  You’re _bleeding_.  Your hands are covered in cuts and bruises, you ripped open the _roof_ to get here.  And you’ve had a revenant controlling your mind for hours, trying to force you to kill everyone you love.  And yet the first thing you ask me is _am I all right_?” She flung her arms around his neck, burying her face in his one good shoulder, finally feeling the tears begin to flow down her cheeks.  “Don’t you ever do this to me again,” she whispered.  “If I had lost you forever, so soon after you finally came back to me again . . .”

“I’m sorry,” he murmured into her hair.  “I could think of no other way to keep you safe.  I had faith in Clarke, and in you.  But someone had to destroy the _neb ankh._   I swear to you, I had no idea she would be able to use me against you, I only thought – “

“That you would die,” she finished for him, and he looked away.  “You thought the fire would take you with her.”

“It should have.  I cannot understand why it did not.  Unless . . . “ But he stopped, shook it off.  It would sound mad if he tried to explain it, this feeling that somehow, somewhere, Jacob Griffin was watching him, keeping him safe, even after Marcus had taken off the rings.  So he said nothing, just bent his head and kissed her mouth as all around them the people they loved came back to themselves one by one, the revenant’s influence gone for good.  He kissed her as Jackson helped Maya into Lexa’s chair and tore off the hem of his shirt to bandage her ankle.  He kissed her as the Millers, father and son, embraced with tears in their eyes, and Bellamy pulled his sister into his arms.  He kissed her as Raven rushed in, glowing with triumph, covered in dirt, to report that she had been to the churchyard and done the same thing that Clarke and Lexa, in the dream-world version of the same place, had done – removed the necklace from the skeleton of Peri Gordon, instantly destroying the nest of the revenant.  Now the necklace was only a necklace, and Rebecca’s body could finally be buried in hallowed ground, beside the woman she loved.

It was over, at last.  A century of supernatural evil, finally cleansed from the world.  Justice for Costia, for all Rebecca’s victims, but justice for Rebecca too.  And everyone Abby loved still standing at the end of it, here in this room. Her entire family.  Everyone she loved was safe.

They had done it, together.  All of them.

They had won.

* * * * *

It was the business of the better part of the day and evening to tend to everyone’s wounds, obtain clothing and necessities for the servants (who had come here by revenant mind control, with no luggage or anywhere to sleep), rent rooms for them all, feed them, and make travel arrangements for everyone’s return to the village.  By the time the original party had made their way back to Marcus’ little house, they were utterly exhausted, yet too full of questions for each other to entertain the notion of sleep. 

So they washed the ash of the dead woman's house out of their hair, and put on their nightclothes, and made a fire in the hearth of the small, cozy parlor, and Marcus handed round large glasses of brandy, and one by one, each told their version of the story.  Clarke relayed the heartbreaking tale of Peri Gordon and the way Rebecca Pramheda had really died, with Lexa joining her to recount her rescue and the trip to the graveyard.  Raven then explained what she had discovered in the real churchyard, where she had found herself unaccountably able, somehow, to sense Clarke and Lexa’s presence.  It was her efforts to call out to them, once she found Peri’s gravestone, that had manifested in the dream-state as the flock of ravens which guided them and helped uncover the tomb.  Lexa could not account for it, but it did not escape Marcus or Abby's notice that the silver pendant which had served as Raven's protective talisman was in the shape of just such a bird.  Perhaps the boy whose name they never learned was protecting them all along as well, just as Vera and Jacob had.) Marcus, in turn, told what he could remember of his time under Rebecca’s control, while Abby forced herself, painful though it was for all of them - for Marcus even more than her - to narrate what had taken place in the room after Raven had left it, as she had steeled herself for the possibility of having to take the life of the man she loved in order to save them all.  She refused to permit him to continue apologizing for it, just as he refused to allow her to feel guilty every time he winced at the pain in his shoulder, but the shadow of how very close they had come to losing each other was not easily chased away.

Still, a warm fire and a large brandy and her daughter’s drowsy head on her lap went a very great distance toward mending things.

They sat in companionable silence for a long time.  Clarke drifted off eventually, feet tucked up beneath her on the sofa, Abby stroking the golden hair glowing in the firelight where it lay against the dark fabric of her skirt.  Raven had dozed off too, in the rocking chair, leaving Marcus alone with his old friend and his new love, sipping brandy and watching the fire and listening to the peaceful sound of the two sleeping girls’ soft breathing.

“What now?” Marcus said suddenly, looking over at Lexa, who sat beside him.  “What will you do, now that your life’s work is completed?”

She looked startled at the question, as though she had never considered it.  “I . . . do not know,” she confessed honestly.  “To tell the truth, Marcus, I never thought beyond the possibility of this day.  To defeat the revenant, to finish the work Titus left me, to avenge Costia’s death . . . I prayed that day would come, but never asked myself what lay on the other side of it.”

“A new beginning,” said Marcus, smiling.  “Tomorrow the sun will rise on a world with no revenant in it, and you may be anyone you like.”

“To new beginnings, then,” said Lexa, extending her glass of brandy to clink lightly against his, and though she said nothing aloud, the flicker of her glance from Marcus to Abby and back again spoke volumes.

“To new beginnings,” said Abby, toasting them both, looking up to meet Marcus’ dark eyes, watching her with some deep and intense emotion.  “For all of us.”

* * *

 

They slept sitting up in the parlor that night, all five of them comforted by the others’ presence, by heartbeats and breath and warm skin.  Abby closed her eyes still stroking Clarke’s hair, while Lexa drifted off with her head on Marcus’ shoulder.

Marcus was the last to fall asleep.  He looked at the women’s faces, one by one.  _Winter, spring, summer, autumn,_ he found himself thinking unexpectedly.  Lexa, cool and pale with her crisp gray-green eyes.  Clarke, all pink and gold with eyes like a cloudless blue sky.  Raven, so vivid and warm and fiery.  And Abby, his beloved Abby, with that honey-colored hair that held a thousand different colors inside it, like the leaves changing color in September.  Abby with her quiet radiance, her warm brown gaze, her extraordinary heart.  Abby who he had loved all of his life, who he had thought forever lost to him, but who had meant “home” to him even before he had known how to put the feeling into words.  The years had passed, the seasons changed, they were no longer the children they had once been, but time had not faded Abigail Griffin, it had only refined her.  She was more Abby now - more vivid, more alive, more beautiful, and infinitely more dear to him - than she had been the day, so many years ago, when he had boarded that ship and sailed away from England, leaving her behind to a life he believed he would never share.  Leaving behind a love he thought could never be his.  

He had traveled half a world away to escape from it, and had only come back because he believed she was gone.

How extraordinarily wrong he had been, he realized as he watched the firelight glow against her hair.  Wrong about everything that mattered.

He had thought he had come home weeks ago, when he first stepped foot once more onto English soil.  But home was not England.  Home was not Arkadia, or Chancellor Lane, or even the house he had returned to.  Home was any room that had Abby Griffin in it.  Home could be anywhere on earth, if she was beside him.

“To new beginnings,” he murmured under his breath, then closed his eyes, leaned back against the sofa, and drifted off to sleep.


End file.
